Jack Reacher Spoilers

[Crothian]

I went out and saw the Jack Reacher movie today. It is based on the book One Shot and I'm a fan of the series and have read all the books. It will be interesting to see if this film suffers from the tragedy last week even though the events are very different.

The movie was what I was expecting. Cruise did a fine job and was menacing enough. The character in the book is described as six foot four and 250 pounds which he is not but he did good enough to not take away from the movie. I'm sure there are plenty of things one can nit pick about the movie but my only one is from the book that they kept in the movie. In the end Reacher says he never would have thought to fingerprint the coins. I find this really tough to believe just because in shows like Law and Order, CSI, NCIS, and all the other investigation shows it seems they always print the coins no matter if it yields something for the story or not. It is a nitpick and they could have gotten rid of that line from Reacher and it would not have changed the movie at all because by the time he says it everything is already revealed.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I like it, for a crime drama it was not bad

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

I've been describing it to friends as a really solid crime thriller, but quite forgettable. I'm unlikely to be interested in bothering to see it again, but I enjoyed watching it whilst I was there.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Saw it yesterday and enjoyed it, and we were not previously familiar with the characters or stories. Did some reserach afterward and found a lot of little things that link back to the bigger story continuity (scars, hatred of knife fighting, etc).

Though the story had the disadvantage of being slightly predictable, and my wife and I felt we were a step ahead of the movie the whole time. For example:

Spoiler

as soon as they cut to the parking meter, I thought "what murderer is going to pay for parking", and when they revealed the suspect was a former military sniper, I knew "first, any trained sniper would police his brass, and second, a trained sniper is going to support his weapon and not fire from the edge of a building like show in the movie, so clearly it's a set up."

But entertaining because of the character nevertheless.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Oh yeah, it was entertaining enough but it won't go down in history as awesome. I didn't give a second thought to the coin, but then I did get the vibe that the film was counting on viewers being largely uneducated about certain things or that they would just chose to ignore them in the cause of "willing suspension of disbelief." Maybe some of both. Just from the editing and portrayal of the detective I thought he was suspect from the word "go" so when he was finally "revealed" it just came off as a not particularly well-executed twist. Would have been hard to manage that anyway since we are moving through the movie with Reacher looking for proof that it's not just that the crime scene was set-up but that there is a VERY deeply coordinated effort behind it - and if the police commissioner comes to be suspect then the investigating officer is either a dupe himself, complicit in the conspiracy, or is actually fooling the commisioner and all they're doing is telegraphing the plot twist that we KNOW is coming anyway.