Jack Reacher | C+
Timing is everything. Nothing makes that clearer
than the opening minutes of Tom Cruise’s violently disposable action movie Jack
Reacher. In it a gunman roosts in a parking garage overlooking Pittsburgh’s lovely riverfront and levels his rifle’s scope on a string of unsuspecting
targets. There’s an executive-type sitting on a bench with a bouquet of roses,
a pretty blonde, a rushed businesswoman, a mom, and young woman with a preschooler.
As the crosshairs fall on the little girl it’s hard not to feel a bit sick to
your stomach. In the aftermath of the intolerable grief and violence that
struck Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, watching five apparently
random people get gunned down for our vicarious entertainment seems obscene.
But had director Christopher McQuarrie’s (Valkyrie,
The Way of the Gun) Jack Reacher opened two weeks ago it would have
been regarded as just another gritty, fast-paced murder mystery — a little more
brutal than some might have expected, but very much in sync with Hollywood’s
more recent thrillers.
Riding high on the global success of last year’s
Mission Impossible IV, the middle-aged Cruise has slated an impressive
list of upcoming projects that seem determined to eclipse the negative effects
of his personal life and keep him on the A-list. Author Lee Child’s drifter
vigilante character Jack Reacher (Ethan Hunt without the gadgets or teammates),
with its nine dark-hued novels and dedicated fan base, is an obvious platform
for Cruise to exploit. Nothing about the intended franchise is unusual or
surprising, and it makes perfect economic sense for Hollywood’s entertainment
mill. The movie’s thrills are hardly unique and it can be rightly argued that
the opening assault is a circumstantial launching point for the deeper criminal
conspiracy that follows rather than a descent into the lunatic actions of mass
murderer. Reacher teams up with a defense attorney (Rosamund Pike) after
evidence suggests that the Iraq War veteran arrested for the shootings has been
framed. Predictable plot twists and chase scenes ensue in a stylish but
otherwise old-school thriller. In many ways, Jack Reacher is a throwback
to the macho crime movies of the ’70s where no-BS anti-heroes dispensed street
justice without hesitation or remorse. After all, when your villain is a creepy
European with a sourball eye and missing fingers (played by documentary maker
Werner Herzog) who’s got time for a trial?
Nevertheless, the events of last week encourage
deeper reflection on what we seek from the violence that is so casually
depicted in today’s movies. Instead of using the terrible murders of Sandy Hook
as a reason to indict Hollywood, however, I think it offers us an opportunity
to consider our own impulses and reactions. Many of the critics at the Jack
Reacher screening I attended expressed an uneasiness with McQuarrie’s
masterfully directed opening scene — I suspect it was the literalness of seeing
a child targeted by a gunman — but otherwise voiced little moral discomfort
with a film that included protracted shoot-outs, chest-thumping vigilante
retribution, and severe beat-downs (the most unusual of which has Reacher
pummeling a man into unconsciousness with the head of another). In other words,
the movie was business as usual, and their overall reaction was apathy.
And yet, amid the banal plot twists and
brute-force violence, there is an intriguing and gut-wrenching subplot in Jack
Reacher that sends Pike’s character out to interview family members of the
victims. McQuarrie highlights the terrible repercussions of violence, giving a
name, family and face to those gunned down in his opening. Unfortunately, the
moment isn’t expanded upon and seems more oriented toward justifying Reacher’s
unlawful actions than challenging us to examine why audiences are titillated by
realistic depictions of murder.
Conversely, this past fall saw a handful of
crime thrillers that seemed more attuned to the moral disconnect between the
violence and brutality we loathe in the real world but seem to embrace at the
cineplex. Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths and Rhian Johnson’s Looper tried to address the consequences of violence even as they indulged in it.
Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, flawed as it was, attempted to
juxtapose the casual yet destructive impact of white-collar and political crime
against the actions of its boneheaded thugs. None of those films did
particularly well at the box office.
Last
week, the Pittsburgh premiere for Jack Reacher was canceled out of
“respect” for the tragic events in Connecticut. Other violent film premieres
followed suit, including Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Defensive
handwringing came next. Perhaps it’s encouraging that both Hollywood and the
public react like this, expressing recognition and even a bit of shame about
their indulgences. What remains to be seen is whether we the audience are
willing to experience films that make us reflect on why we are drawn to their
mayhem, or instead continue to only reward those that cater to our most
atavistic impulses.
This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2012.