A B-Movie With a Few Exceptions

Rating: 3/10 (8 December 2013)

When I head that Tom Cruise would be playing a 6 feet 5 inches and 250 pounds character, I knew something was amiss. And it was so distracting noticing the scenes where they tried to make Cruise look big, even though some other scenes showed his true height. Swaggering like a large man does not make you look large...
On paper, it was a hit movie. Big star (Cruise), talented co-star (Duvall), great screenwriter (McQuarrie), interesting European villain (Herzog) - oh and a series of novels that have sold tens of millions of books.
In reality, it fails in many directions.
The acting is wooden - Cruise has zero personality, as do any others - perhaps they have all reached their Scientology "clear" status?. The pace is tedious. Comedic touches felt wrong. The sexual chemistry was poorly staged and hard to believe -I don't think there has ever been a convincing romance in a Cruise film, not even with his former wife. The initial killings weren't impactful enough for me to have me emotionally hate the villain.
Spoiler: the bathroom fight was ludicrous. Three thugs sneaked up on our unaware hero, and he would've been dead except for half-a-dozen failed attempts to hit him.
If Cruise wasn't the lead, this film would have been straight to video.
On the plus side, the fight scenes and car chase weren't bad, and felt unique. The story was great, it was just told in a dull way... we knew almost everything prior to Reacher working it out. It was like an Agatha Christie novel told by a 4-year-old.
An average screenwriter could have done a better job than McQuarrie (writer of The Usual Suspects). Seemingly he is just a hack for hire these days, even when he is directing his own work.
To make it work they should have:

rewritten the screenplay - had a hulking actor of Schwarzenegger talent or above to play Reacher - changed the lawyer to a male - shown Reacher prior to the get-go, his lifestyle - made the setting more rural, more small-town

I didn't care for Reacher in this one bit. He came across as so stupidly unassailable as Harry Potter. Smug and boring.