First off this was a lot better than I thought it was going to be, but it still isn't any kind of ground breaking movie. Yes, there is a scene where the Cruiser gets his shirt off. And, for the first time in a long time, there wasn't a scene of the Cruiser running somewhere, really fast. This did surprise me because in most Cruiser movies there always seems to be at least one scene were he's running really hard to get somewhere. I don't why this is, but, I think, somewhere inside of him there's some deep psychological attraction to the Road Runner. But to compensate for these non-running scenes, there are also countless scenes where the Cruiser enters a room and it seems every woman he walks past or even looks at him is sizing him up for a thrown on the bed. Cruises ego has got to be the size of a galaxy at this point in his life, as he likes to play people that are basically ordinary, but have elevated their life to a place where they are extraordinary. I think the Cruiser thinks his life is like that and I bet Scientology isn't helping with the ego check either. But all of this aside the movie a good watch.
It's not an all out action movie. It does have action scenes but instead of being over the top, the scenes are played more or less as realistically as they can played with a character of Jack Reacher's abilities. When he fights, he fights to win not to extended the fight scene out longer. No, in this movie Reacher fights like a man who knows how to fight and he shoots to kill, not to maim. And this movie is all the better for it.
The movie does a good balancing act of setting up bias' with the characters only to have them presented with evidence that contradicts their preconceived bias' and unlike most movies, these characters act, as any sane person would act, when presented with the truth. They change their perspective, the bias is still there, but their perspective of the situation has changed. This aspect of the movie I really liked, because if there's one thing I can't stand in stories is dumb characters who continue to act as they normally would act when everything logically tells them they should act in another way. But because the writer/producer/director of the movie has their own ideological viewpoints and would rather stick with their ideologies than what makes a story good. They end up sacrificing a lot more realism and believability in pursuit of preaching than storytelling. Jack Reacher does not stoop to these levels, and, as I said before, it is all the better for it. This type of movie owes a lot things to that superb show on FX, Justified, even Cruisers character has a lot of things in common with Justified's main character Raylan Givens.
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