Jack Reacher

RATING: C-

Usually, Tom Cruise is in pretty good action movies. Or at least pretty decent ones, anyway. Sure, occasionally there'll be the duds also. They're few and far between, because Cruise seems pretty good at picking decent action movies to be a part of. 

In this particular one, we open up with a sniper shooting five people dead. Randomly. In the middle of some park. A fingerprint brings him in, and when he meets the law, he offers only this to them: "Get Jack Reacher." And who exactly is Jack Reacher? This shadowy former Army guy who essentially kind of drifts around as some sort of vigilante. At least, I think that's what he is. That's about as far as I could figure it out by the end of the movie, anyway. 

He eventually gets sort of ensnared into some sort of weird plot involving some random organization who covers their tracks pretty well. And yet the purpose of the shooting at the beginning of the film that sets everything into motion isn't touched on very much. Reacher seems to be a man seeking the truth, but he seems to forget about that particular part once he is framed for murder and once someone he cares about is kidnapped, at which point he only seems to care about burying them. 

Perhaps it's not even that it's entirely a nonsensical plot, considering that about 90 minutes of this 130 minute film move so slowly that I was struggling to pay attention. I really had a hard time actually being interested or caring except when Reacher was fighting people or in the middle of an admittedly entertaining car chase halfway through the film. The rest of the film moves pretty slowly; somehow I'm already forgetting details about the plot even as I write this review. 

Tom Cruise does fine per the usual, and Rosamund Pike is okay as well; however, there aren't really any other actors that are noteworthy or ones that you've even heard of, except for Jai Courtney; and his performance is more unintentionally comedic at times. The direction feels a little dull as well. The film might've had a better chance if it'd been 30 or more minutes shorter.

For a film that had somewhat decent marketing at the time of its release, it's quite a bit of a letdown. It's not without its moments, but they feel kinda far between, and there's little else going on otherwise that had my attention. For an action "thriller," it's not particularly thrilling for the majority of its runtime. One could certainly do worse, but when it comes to Tom Cruise action movies, I can probably think of at least ten other flicks you could try instead.