JACK REACHER

This is the first of what was a hoped for franchise starring Tom Cruise.  

To start on a positive note the plot to this film (based on a Lee Child novel of course) is a good one.  

We start off by seeing a sniper kill several apparently random people; and then he is identified and arrested very easily (too easily?).

The alleged sniper, James Barr, wants his defence team to find Jack Reacher.  This is usually quite a challenge but surprisingly the elusive Reacher then turns up.  He has a personal interest in Barr, an ex-army sniper who evaded justice out in Iraq for a crime he committed, a wrong which Jack wants very much to right.

So it's a strange turn of events that then Jack takes on the job of assisting the defence by reviewing the case against Barr, and would you believe it, Barr's been set up?  But why?

Reacher's appeal as a character is that besides being a super-effective fighting machine he is also a super-smart investigator, and it's good to see him here using those skills to get to the bottom of what is going on.  

It turns out that the victims were not entirely random and that one of them was the real target.  Find out who that target was and you might identify the motive and therefore the killer.  

It's a clever idea - to conceal the motive for a murder by hiding it among other killings.  It's a plot device which Agatha Christie used (and invented?) in 'The ABC Murders'.

The perpetrators of the murders are a construction firm that goes from city to city making money out of dodgy deals.  That's a bit dull so Child livens it up by having the firm be headed up by an ex-Soviet prisoner known only as Zec.  He's played by the German film director, Werner Herzog, a bizarre bit of casting.

Barr's defence team consists of Helen, played by Rosamund Pike.  She doesn't get to do much other than to follow Jack's orders and hope to jump into bed with him.  Surprisingly that doesn't happen.  (Given how asexual Ethan Hunt is perhaps it isn't so surprising).

To complicate matters, her father is the local DA, played by the great Richard Jenkins.  Sadly he gets to do very little, and in fact their father-daughter relationship could be entirely taken out of the story given how irrelevant it is.  Early on he seems very concerned that in defending Barr she is making a disastrous career choice, yet later on when she tells him what she and Jack have uncovered, and that her life is in danger, he seems remarkably uninterested. All very odd.

As the plot unfolds we get the obligatory scenes in any Reacher story where Jack is set upon by a gang of thugs who are of course no match for him in a fist fight (maybe they should just shoot him?). 

The film ends on a high note with the introduction of Robert Duvall who has a lot of fun as a veteran who gets to help Jack defeat the bad guys and rescue Helen.

The director is Christopher McQuarrie who also adapted the source novel.  He does a competent job, with some nice bits of misdirection here and there, but it's far from being his best work. 

So overall it's fine but also when all's said and done, quite forgettable.

RATING: ✓ Cheers