Posted in: Movies, Recent Updates | Tagged: christopher mcquarrie, film, jack reacher, lee childs, tom cruise, trailer

Four Things About The Jack Reacher Teaser

Alasdair Stuart writes for Bleeding Cool.

Lee Child's novels about a traumatized ex-Military Policeman turned pseudo-Ronin have been belting along quite happily for some time now. The premise, that Reacher is a man constantly on the move and constantly getting into the very trouble he's trying to avoid, is great pulp fodder and Child's combination of grim pragmatism and glee at getting to write about people hitting one another very very hard tends to make them fun reading.

Now we get the first movie adaptation of the Reacher books, with Jack Reacher, the teaser for which has just been released. Adapted from the novel One Shot, it sees Reacher asked for by name by a shooting suspect who killed five people with six bullets. OR DID HE? etc. What follows is a noirish chase through the American underworld. What we get before that, is four thoughts about the teaser.

1.Scars

Cruise's attitude towards his roles and physical damage has always seemed a little off. The ending of Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol in particular seems to frantically row back from a potentially interesting injury that would have changed the character around neatly for a fifth movie. However, his version of Reacher isn't so much a network of scars as two or three really, really large ones stitched together. Much like the car it's a nice visual signifier; this man does what he does and damage isn't really a factor.

2.'I am not a Hero.'

The tone and placement of this speech early on interests me. The tone because this is slightly more Martin Riggs than Jack Reacher, a more brittle take on a character who is usually far more pragmatic about his outsider status. As a comic related aside, it also reminded me a little of something else.

The placement of the speech, here in literally the first two minutes of the movie we get to see, is fascinating. Inevitably a lot of people are going to look at this as rolling damage control/some sort of metatextual mea culpa in yet another attempt to get Cruise's on screen persona as separate from his offscreen one as possible and there's definitely would seem to be an element of that. There's also a genuine attempt to break the near continuous line of 'Edgy spy' roles Cruise has happily taken since Mission: Impossible. He seems continually reluctant to be portrayed as anything less than physically perfect but, based on this trailer, he's finally made his peace with playing horrifically broken loose cannons.

And speaking of horrifically breaking…

3.Crunchy Violence

The fight psychology here is really interesting. We don't see much but there seems to be a combination of extremely precise, nasty, Bourne-tastic close quarter combat and full on brawling. That second one speaks to the previous point, that this isn't the clean, precise, principled espionage ninja Cruise has played before. Reacher's different and if he has to stomp a mud hole in a bunch of thugs in the rain, so be it. Which brings us to…

4.You Can't Get Cute With Bloody Knuckles

The one on mob fight scene at the end plays very oddly to me. There's the same neat, nasty up close fighting style but the scene as a whole pulls it's punches. It tries to be cute with the climactic face off and goes full on cheeseball with the ridiculously low angle 'bad man walking' angle we finish on. That shot neatly reminds us that Cruise is playing a man described as being a 6'5 slab of muscle and he…well, isn't. It's a pulled punch in a teaser that throws every other blow with the very baddest of intentions and it really stands out.

I'm honestly conflicted. I like the books, Christopher McQuarrie in the director's chair has my attention and Rosamund Pike, David Oyelowo and Robert Duvall in the supporting cast all bodes well. I even like Cruise in this sort of role, although God knows he's done it enough times now. Nonetheless, something seems off to me. Maybe the full trailer will play differently.

Jack Reacher is scheduled for release in the US on December 21st and in the UK a week later.

*Brendon's note: Cruise has actually played lots of films in which he is far from physically perfect. Indeed, I think Alasdair is exactly wrong on that front. Witness Born on the Fourth of July, Vanilla Sky and Valkyrie for clear examples of characters with missing parts or heavy, heavy scarring that even take a turn at defining how they are seen, in those stories.

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