Tom too short to walk tall

Rating: 6/10 (9 January 2013)

I'm not an all-out fan, but I've defended Tom Cruise for years on the basis of great acting in movies like Magnolia and Rain Man, so I was prepared to suspend disbelief while he acted six foot five.
Unfortunately, for the first time ever, his height bothered me. And the fact that it must have bothered him might explain why Jack Reacher pulls its punches on the the smart/funny front and descends predictably into a shoot-em-up. A more secure - oh let's face it, a TALLER - actor could have pulled off the Man of Mystery thing, but Tom Cruise JUST CAN'T. He has the look of a well-scrubbed, well-fed farm boy who's been working out in the barn, not a dangerous lone-wolf drifter, appearing from the mist to solve crime with his intellect and his fists.
Without that definitive central characterisation, Jack Reacher could only have saved itself with a cracking plot and sparkling humour - making Cruise taller with knowing wit. There are a few stabs at it, but Tom Cruise is out of his depth here and he's not even in the deep end. Instead he flails for the lifesaver of fast cars and big guns, while the plot is only workmanlike. His skills as an actor are redundant, and in their absence, he's exposed in the spotlight and found wanting by ten inches.
Everything else about the movie is standard fare. Rosamund Pike does her usual deer-caught-in-the headlights thing. To keep Cruise seeming sexy in the absence of sex, she's required to be a lawyer but with a very low neckline. More headlights-caught-in-the-headlights. It's distracting to everyone but Cruise, who's not tall enough to look down her cleavage.
I don't know how Lee Child handled the plot, but it's spoilt here by having the reveal right up front, which is an unusual technique when you then have Jack Reacher take 50 minutes to reveal what you already knew.
The action is generally poor, with Cruise looking dumber and dumber as the film goes on. He walks backwards out of doors into crowbars and chooses the loudest possible method of sneaking up on villains. More than once his well laid plans depend on slapstick crooks and trained killers who can't shoot straight.
Werner Herzog is a comic-book baddie who chewed off his own fingers to stay alive in a gulag. Not sure quite how he got into construction after that, but this part of the plot/motivation is so weak it's more like an afterthought and doesn't matter.
In smarter hands, even Tom Cruise could have made us believe he was Jack Reacher, by embracing his lack of height and making it work in his favour. But the flashy attempts to distract us from his stature only makes us think about it constantly.
The trailer-makers knew what the film should have been - a roller-coaster of thrills and laughs and original, quirky moments. Sadly, it's more like the teacups.