Adequate genre yarn brightened up by Duvall's riveting appearance

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2012)

Tom Cruise plays a familiar genre vigilante hero in the habit of taking the law into his own hands when the law doesn't deliver justice. In this movie, however, there is an interesting twist. As the story unfolds, he finds out that the villain he is going after turns out to be a framed victim.
Let's start from the beginning. We witness a sniper executing with icy precision a shooting of five apparently random victims. Later when we see the apprehended suspect Barr in the police questioning room, it is a different guy, who, at the end of a 16-hour questioning, only scribbleds 3 words: get Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise). Intense record searching only finds that this deadly war veteran has completely vanished into thin air in the last two years. When Reacher finally shows up on his own accord the situation has changed. The suspect is in a coma as a result of assaults by fellow prisoners. Anyway, Reacher intimates that he is here not to help but to "bury" Barr who got away with murder (literally speaking) while in service.
The key players on the side of the law are police inspector Emerson (David Oyelowo), district attorney Rodin (Richard Jenkins) and defence lawyer Helen (Rosamund Pike) whose modest aim is not to have Barr acquitted but just avoid the death sentence. One little complication is that Helen is Rodin's daughter, rebellious against her father's somewhat dubious practice of only prosecuting cases that he is sure to win, putting personal success ahead of justice.
To cut a long story short, Helen somehow manages to hire Jack as a private investigator and the two gradually come to the realization that Barr has been framed. The development pretty well follows the predictable formula of one clue leading to another, a process spiced with some brutal fights and exciting car chases, with a couple of deaths thrown in for good measure (one guy chose to be shot rather than bite off his own finger as a gesture of repentance). The grand finale is, again predictably, the rescue of a damsel in distress.
Cruise can deliver Jack Reacher while half-asleep. Pike gives a good shot at her rather unimpressive character. Last seen in "Killing them softly" spending most of his screen time talking to Brad Pitt's character in a car, Jenkin, a most in-demand and very good actor (nominated in Oscar for Best Actor in "The visitor" in 2007), has even less to do in this movie.
But just as you start to wonder if you should have used the admission price on a different choice, you happily see that you are at least getting your money's worth with a somewhat brief, but absolutely riveting performance by Robert Duvall. He appears close to the end, as an ex-marine sharp shooter Cash (now operating a shooting club) who helps Reacher out in the final set piece. One example will illustrate my point. Perched on a slope waiting for the bad guys, Reacher asks "Can you take them out?" You would have expect some sharp retort such as "Not if I'm a lousy shot like you" or some such quip. But no. Without missing a beat and without as much as a small hint of a sneer, Cash simply says "You mean to dinner?" The line is not bad at all, but it needs someone like Duvall who delivers it in a way nobody else can.