A blonde and a Scientologist walk into the DA’s office. (Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures)In Lee Child’s best-selling Jack Reacher novels, the author describes his hero as a formidable 6’ 5” with a 50-inch chest. The profile does not exactly scream “diminutive Scientologist with a Napoleon complex.”
As soon as Tom Cruise was hired to play Reacher, fans of the novels responded with a clamor on a level previously known only to Tolkeinites. I haven’t read any of Child’s books, so I can’t feel the popular umbrage. Cruise’s attempts to emit alpha male swagger are pretty silly no matter how the character was written, but he does not make this product sink or swim. In 130 minutes of competent is sluggish action-movie making, there are about five minutes that transcend the genre, which I could recommend to anyone from a connoisseur of B-movies to a Criterion Collection completist. And those minutes belong to Werner Herzog.
That’s right, the arthouse director who dragged a steamboat up a mountain, and who in 2006 pulled Joaquin Phoenix out of his wrecked car, owns Tom Cruise. In his greying years, marked by white hairs each of which he calls Kinski, Herzog has developed the air of a doddering grandpa who whittles toothpick sculptures on the front porch while telling tales of the German New Wave and the harsh realities of filming in the Amazon. With a voice that rarely projects above a menacing whisper, Herzog plays our hero’s Russian nemesis, The Zec, which means prisoner. He’s is the best thing in the movie, and the only reason I saw it. But let’s set some background first.
The film opens with an efficient procedural laying out a gunman’s m.o. (and an inventory of clues) leading up to a sniper’s crosshairs. Perched atop a parking garage across from Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, the shooter picks off a handful of what seem to be random victims. Police quickly arrest Iraq war vet James Barr (Joseph Sikora), a trained killer gone wrong, as the unequivocal suspect. The suspect is asked to sign offered a confession to sign, but instead asks for the movie by name: GET JACK REACHER.
Enter Reacher, an actor of short stature reaching for a level of charisma and testosterone that seems to escape not only him but the people around him, including Barr’s lawyer Helen (Rosamund Pike) who asks him to please put his shirt on. The sight of Cruise’s prosthetically scarred torsal flesh brings to mind the charred flesh of another Tom who would have made this a more consistently entertaining movie: Wiseau.
“It was then that I realized that this so-called Hollywood superstar was profoundly delusional.” (Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures)Director Christopher McQuarrie won a Best Screenplay Oscar for The Usual Suspects, but his directorial debut, The Way of the Gun (2000), didn’t have anywhere near that success. Jack Reacher, which McQuarrie adapted from Child’s novel One Shot, is his first gig behind the camera in a dozen years. The movie piles on action hero cliches with precision but little flair, and it goes on for way too long.
But there are sparks of movie magic here, that color outside the lines of your standard Hollywood product. These come from a man best known as a director of physical and psychologically daring productions that would leave most action stars whimpering in the fetal position. Herzog, subtly aided by a fake cataract, only has to use his normal speaking voice to steal every scene he’s in.
You want desperately to see more of The Zec, but even lines promised in the trailers are absent from the movie. So don’t wait for Herzog’s gently menacing “Get the lawyer!” It’s sadly not here. But if you have any interest in seeing the movie I won’t spoil what is there, a detail that many reviewers have revealed. Let’s just say Herzog has a peculiar back story that would have made a fantastic movie all by itself.
A Jack Reacher franchise may be inevitable, but I hope the film launches something far more entertaining: a rejuvenated career for Werner Herzog, character actor.
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Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, based on the novel One Shot by Lee Child
With Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, and Werner Herzog.
Rated PG-13 for violence, language, some drug material, and delusions of grandeur.
Running time 130 minutes.
Opens today at a theater near you.
