
Werner Herzog’s uncommon presentation as the villain was also lauded across the board, while Tom Cruise’s role as the titular hard guy hit home with a majority of viewers. The disturbing opening - which, like much of the film, is shot and cut with taut exactness shows a sniper position himself in a parking garage across the water from Pittsburgh’s baseball stadium and methodically picks off what looks to be five random aims on the riverfront promenade. Jack Reacher, then, is all business, taking a break from whatever he does with the rest of his time to help solve a case that initially looks open and shut. Happily, Cruise plays him with no argument in a direct, pared-down way with little sense of amped-up intensity or self-importance he can even take a joke at his own expense, as when he’s stripped to the waist in a motel room, and Rosamund Pike says, “Could you put your shirt on, please?” Tom Cruise might not be the 6-foot-5 rock described in the books, but he makes the title role fit him like a latex glove in a winning turn that could spawn a popular new franchise for the star, if public reaction to Christopher McQuarrie’s film is as strong as its fun quotient warrants. Jack Reacher is an old-fashioned type of man he doesn’t use a cell phone or credit cards, he travels by bus - and the first film adaptation of one of Lee Child’s Reacher novels has a correspondingly rough, low-tech, real-muscle appeal. There is every chance that JACK REACHER will be more than a one shot and expand into a brand new franchise for star Tom Cruise despite the initial controversy surrounding writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s decision to pick him to play the character of Jack Reacher.

JACK REACHER is coming to your nearby cinemas.
