USA Today’s Claudia Puig says the film “travels on well-trod turf,” with Cruise spending “a lot of time in generic action hero mode.” PHOTOS: How the holiday films are tracking

The only “real fun” in the film, Scott says, comes from “a pretty good car chase” and appearances by Werner Herzog and Robert Duvall.Īnn Hornaday of the Washington Post calls “Jack Reacher” “a mismatch of wincingly epic proportions.” Reacher, she says, “is a supposedly reluctant hero, but with his penchant for grandstanding it’s difficult to imagine him turning down any opportunity to show off a nearly bottomless - and increasingly monotonous - store of Cool Guy-approved skills.”Īlthough Cruise has proved “a perfectly credible action hero” in the past, Hornaday says, this turn “is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise’s virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher’s alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.” And also less interesting.” The storytelling doesn’t impress Scott either, as the film “lumbers through a series of beatings, shootings and bludgeonings on its way to a climactic, not terribly surprising showdown.” Scott also finds that the on-screen Reacher leaves something to be desired: “Part comic-book superhero, part Old West vigilante and wholly preposterous, Reacher is far less enigmatic than he or anyone else in the movie thinks he is. “In Reacher’s case size matters … But it’s Reacher’s interior life that is the real issue … The actor can do cool and calculating, it’s the meaning behind it that never flickers to life.”

“It’s a great character, but one that doesn’t suit Cruise,” Sharkey says. Times film critic Betsy Sharkey writes that “Jack Reacher” is “so thrill-less, so chill-less … that it is unlikely to spark interest, much less controversy.” The problem, Sharkey says, is that Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie fail to capture the essence of Reacher’s character - a man tortured by his dark past and also a guy who is physically imposing.

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