The DA's rebellious daughter, Helen (Rosamund Pike) is Barr's lawyer and she decides to hire Jack as her investigator, or perhaps just to have his handsomeness around. He visits the District Attorney (Richard Jenkins, in typical shifty mode) and a detective on the case (David Oyelowo), but they seem to have everything too neatly sewn up. Reacher, who heard of the event, turns up on his own.

Before he went under, he scrawled the phrase, 'Get Jack Reacher' on a pad. The suspected killer, an Iraq war vet with a trigger-happy history named James Barr (Joseph Sikora), is in a coma. The film's opening is also Jack Reacher's most gripping sequence and the initial premise is intriguing. The resonance of the Sandy Hook shootings is unavoidable, and it's no wonder the Pittsburgh premiere of the film was cancelled last week. The film begins with a sniper in Pittsburgh, hiding in a raised parking garage and picking off five innocent people, including a nanny with a child, across the river. Jack Reacher was written and directed by Brian Singer's writing collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie ( The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie), and it has few distinguishing characteristics except for some unfortunate real-life timing. Jack, who travels light, owns just one shirt, from which he has to wash out the blood stains. The character of Reacher, based on the novel One Shot, the ninth in a series by British writer Jim Grant under the pseudonym Lee Child, is a figure of wish-fulfillment virility – a massively built (6 foot 5, with a 50-inch chest), mathematically gifted, former intelligence officer who lives as a bus-riding drifter and solves crimes that he stumbles across.Ĭruise is too mature, diminutive and fine-looking for the role, even if he has gym-sculpted abs, which he manages to show off. What motivated Tom Cruise to want to play the character of Jack Reacher? A desire to race around in the vintage fast cars used in the film? A shot at a new franchise now that he's finished with Mission Impossible movies? Or just rampant vanity?

Jack reacher full movie