Jack Reacher Reviews
Top CriticThere is a dogged leanness to Reacher's pursuit that lifts his adventures from the generic rut ...
If Cruise's fantasy superhero garners as many staunch fans ... we may be witnessing the birth of a new franchise.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Jack Reacher already feels as if it belongs to another era.
A clumsily condensed mystery/thriller novel made into a movie that offers little more than every other clumsily condensed mystery/thriller novel made into a movie.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A workmanlike action thriller, competent but never particularly thrilling.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The dialogue is often unintentionally funny and Cruise's performance is all wrong.
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| Original Score: 2/5
This movie is a turkey gone rancid.
Werner Herzog, better known as one of the finest living directors, plays a bad guy with Teutonic relish. If he doesn't watch it, he'll have a whole other career for himself playing dead-eyed villains.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
This is brisk, attention-grabbing, and generally unpretentious -- basically an old noir programmer inflated to blockbuster proportions.
It only ends up reminding us of how much better Cruise's riskier, more personal work - particularly his outside-the-box performances in pictures like "Tropic Thunder," "Magnolia" and "Rock of Ages" - truly is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Reacher is limited by a lack of originality and hampered by thematic clichés and generic action sequences.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Cruise is too mature, diminutive and fine-looking for the role, even if he has gym-sculpted abs, which he manages to show off.
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| Original Score: 2/4
See Tom fight. See Tom shoot. See Tom in some other movie.
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| Original Score: C-
It's touching beyond measure to see an ex-jarhead and a former soldier putting aside their differences in a display of mutual respect, understanding and shooting bad guys in the face.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
An average action film, made slightly better by Cruise, and more bizarre by Herzog, and more watchable by Pike, but still within the average range, a silk purse that still says oink.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
No worse and maybe a little better than most of the vigilante movies that clutter the multiplex.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
As the details mount, and the star does what stars do, it starts to seem like a good bag of potato chips. There's no nutritional value, but darned if you don't keep eating.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The picture is joyless and perfunctory. Call it Mission: Possible.
My enjoyment of Jack Reacher winds up outweighing my dislike, but it was a bumpy road to get there.
The movie is muscle-car chase-scene Chevy heaven, with Reacher tearing around in a cherry vintage Chevelle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This movie is the height of by-the-book dullness.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The actor can do cool and calculating, it's the meaning behind it that never flickers to life. "Jack Reacher" plays like Cruise on cruise control.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
[Cruise] doesn't turn in his finest work, frankly, but he's still a solid presence who holds together an otherwise generic thriller.
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| Original Score: 3/5
There's a fine line between macho wish fulfillment and delusional fantasy, and "Jack Reacher" crosses it.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
What the movie sorely needs is a more intriguing detective - a hero human enough to sometimes make mistakes.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's intended to expand a popular fiction franchise into film, but the workmanlike direction of Christopher McQuarrie, although sporadically entertaining, may doom this flick to one-off status.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
The self-confident, supercompetent Reacher is a character Mr. Cruise could play in his sleep, which is pretty much what he does.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
"Jack Reacher" does its work sleekly and well.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This film is deader than the corpses that litter the screen.
Even when the film is cool, it manages to be wrong.
Besides being a mind teaser, "Jack Reacher" offers the muscular thrills of a `70s action flick ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Logic is rarely the point in movies like this (and the novels that inspire them). There's much to enjoy here ...
This is Cruise's show. And he nails it. The patented smile is gone, replaced by a glower that makes Jack Reacher a dark and dazzling ride into a new kind of hell.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Jack Reacher stumbles around looking for a unifying narrative tone, while the star soldiers on, offering up his generic action-hero stance of calm, opaque concentration.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Tom Cruise is in fine form.
Whereas the hyperkinetic actor looks best on the run, Reacher is a slow-moving, six-and-a-half-foot enforcer -- the kind of guy Cruise should be outwitting, not playing.
