Tom Cruise plays a likable vigilante

Rating: 7/10 (12 April 2013)

Jack Reacher, a cop for whom ends always justify the means, has 'I must be played by Tom Cruise' written all over him. The butt-kicking vigilante, similar in many ways to another Tom Cruise role, Mission Impossible's Ethan Hunt, is slick, confident, and merciless. And, although I usually find Cruise's acting and/or roles to be intolerably clichéd, I actually found myself quite liking his character here. As far as the rest of the film goes, it ranks somewhere between decent and good, with some typically unrealistic action scenes characteristic of films in this genre (when Jack is being fired at from all angles by a group of bad guys with submachine guns, there's always a convenient rock just sitting there for him to hide behind to save him being peppered with bullets) bringing down the film's credibility somewhat, some better scenes (such as his brawl with the hired thugs outside the bar) raise the entertainment level of this film to above average standard. Werner Herzog's chilling villain, known only as 'the Zec' adds a darker dimension to the film, while Jai Courtney and David Oyelowo also impress. If only Reacher had a slightly less generic love interest and had the identity of the sniper not been revealed immediately, therefore ruining the suspenseful element there could have been had it been kept a mystery, this film might have scored higher than 7/10.