Jack Reach­er

Eye­brows were raised when the announce­ment was made that Tom Cruise had bagged the lead in a major adap­ta­tion of Lee Child’s 2005 nov­el ​‘One Shot’. Under­stand­ably so: Child’s bar­rel-chest­ed, dirty blond pro­tag­o­nist stands a sky­scrap­ping 6’5″ and is renowned for his sto­ic, remorse­less demeanour – attrib­ut­es Cruise can hard­ly claim to possess.

In Christo­pher McQuarrie’s film, how­ev­er, it’s not Reacher’s size or strength that mat­ter so much as his abil­i­ty to always be think­ing two moves ahead. Reacher’s exten­sive tech­ni­cal and mil­i­tary knowl­edge, pho­to­graph­ic mem­o­ry and uncan­ni­ly accu­rate inter­nal clock make him some­thing of a super­hu­man antihero.

In the world of Tom Cruise: action star, of course, any­thing is pos­si­ble. And yet despite being the best man for the job, not even The Missile’s pow­ers of seduc­tion are enough to res­cue this flat if fleet­ing­ly spec­tac­u­lar con­spir­a­cy thriller.

It all starts so promis­ing­ly. In an awe­some video game-inspired open­ing sequence, a lone gun­man fix­es his crosshairs on a rush hour prom­e­nade. Six shots. Five dead. The crime scene is lit­tered with clues all point­ing to a for­mer Army sniper with a blem­ished men­tal health record. It’s a slam-dunk case. But the sus­pect vehe­ment­ly denies all charges, thick­en­ing the plot by squar­ing a loaded direc­tive at the arrest­ing offi­cers: ​‘Get Jack Reacher’.

Before any­one has time to pick up the phone, though, Reach­er arrives on the scene with the mes­sian­ic swag­ger of an all-star quar­ter­back. Despite the over­whelm­ing evi­dence stacked against the accused, Reach­er is con­vinced of his innocence.

And so with the help of spunky defense attor­ney Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) he sets out to prove just that, inad­ver­tent­ly unveil­ing a cov­er up engi­neered by a mys­te­ri­ous ex-Gulag pris­on­er known sim­ply as The Zec (Wern­er Her­zog) for rea­sons that nev­er ful­ly become clear.

Reach­er is a cool cus­tomer. As com­fort­able han­dling a Chevy Chev­elle in a high-speed chase as he is an auto­mat­ic weapon in a drenched quar­ry or, for that mat­ter, him­self in a street fight. He’s also a bit of a dick – insuf­fer­ably smug, patro­n­is­ing to the author­i­ty fig­ures around him and chau­vin­is­tic to a fault.

If recent genre arche­types like Jason Bourne and to a less­er extent Daniel Craig’s 007 have proven any­thing, it’s that today’s action hero needs to be capa­ble of pulling off extra­or­di­nary feats of men­tal and phys­i­cal prowess while still dis­play­ing gen­uine human emotion.

You can snag the biggest movie star of his gen­er­a­tion, deliv­er thrilling set piece after thrilling set piece, even get Wern­er Her­zog to play the vil­lain, but it all counts for noth­ing if your film (and poten­tial fran­chise) hinges on a char­ac­ter who’s total­ly out of time.