Jack Reacher

In this holiday season, is there a better way other than seeing the latest Tom Cruise flick to remind yourself that your family isn’t all that crazy? Well you might answer maybe until you see the first 15 minutes of Jack Reacharound (as my friend calls it). During this time of the film there’s actually a pretty decent set up to the story and then all of a sudden you see the power of Xenu glowing through Cruise’s eyes and his wicked smile. And you’re instantly taken back to the sex party scenes in Eyes Wide Shut where everyone is wearing weird masks and cloaks. I’m 100% certain that the Cruise took Kubrick to one of his Scientology gatherings for inspiration for that scene.  But it doesn’t just stop there, there’s also a scene where you supposed to swoon at how sexy Cruise is even at the age of 70 (still rather infantile in Xenu years). He’s walking around shirtless while the truly sexy Rosamund Pike tries to contain herself. In the end however, he just looks like Iggy Pop does in his old age now; in shape but a dried up, leathery, reptilian looking shadow of his former self. If you don’t watch sports then you have probably never seen these commercials with 50-70 year old men who take this pill to give them the figure of young body builder. Can you imagine combining this pill with Viagra? I can only imagine the end result being some super old Incredible Hulk hobbling around saying “Hulk bang cougar!!”. Anyway, that’s what Cruise looked like. 

With that said, once you get past the opening set up, this is a pretty entertaining movie and Sir Thomas actually does a decent job as Reacher. You’re a little worried at first because it appears that it’s a pretty open and shut murder mystery as they present the killer to you from the start. But as you learn more about Reacher (a former military cop) , the alleged killer, and the crime itself, the true story starts to unravel. You find yourself at a loss for what really happened and why; and you have to put together the clues as Cruise does.  The movie starts out with a pretty chilling shot where Barr is setting up in a parking garage with a long range rifle and randomly starts killing innocent civilians as they start their day. The lead investigator immediately puts the clues together and finds Barr to arrest him. While trying to get his confession, Barr only writes one thing down and that’s “Get Jack Reacher”. The movie takes off from there.

There are a few overdone fight scenes but for the most part they still get the job done. What will stand out the most is the car chase scene. We all have seen over a thousand times the chase scene where a car drives the wrong way down a one way street and comes out unscathed while miraculously missing every car that’s headed its way. Well what’s cool about the way they filmed this is they put the camera in harms way the entire scene so you actually see the maneuvers it takes to avoid the head on traffic coming at you. And you see this awesome old school Camaro get destroyed as Cruise tries to avoid the cops. 

Im reluctant to talk too much about the plot but the end isn’t quite as fresh as the build up to it might suggest.  But the overall dark tone of the film and the actual ruthlessness of some of the characters makes up for this. There’s one line Cruise has where he says something to the effect of “I want to beat you to a pulp and drink your blood from a boot”. Now normally you would just laugh at something like this but I am fairly certain that Cruise has had human blood from at the very least a gauntlet before. Dude is just that crazy!

Overall I rate this movie as slightly FRESH and suggest that you go get a Reacharound from Sir Thomas like I did. It’s not as bad as you think.