Jai Courtney – Action Hero Movies

This is a mildly entertaining Tom Cruise movie. The action is slow, the drama is mild and intriguing. Tom plays a hotshot character as usual. But the first part particularly worth mentioning is the nasty scene after 45 minutes in – not terribly explicit but quite unpleasant as one goon who messed up is told to chew his own fingers off.

The first hour is rounded off with a comedy sketch of a fight scene where two goons keep getting in each other’s way. But by the 75 minutes in the movie becomes quite gloomy and the mood doesn’t really let up throughout the final hour – the best of this movie has pretty much come and gone already. As such, I’d rate it Bang Average considering the mildness of the excitement early on and the dull ending that followed. That’s not to say there’s no entertainment later on, it just should have been better, considering the set up..

It gets a bit unpleasant when, half an hour before the end, the lead female gets chased and captured by a crooked detective, with the backing of her own father. She gets kidnapped and from this moment on it’s Jack Reacher’s job to save her, and that’s about all that happens.

The main baddies are played by Werner Herzog (the boss, who seems like a genuine psychopath, with vibes of Klaus Schwab minus the eggheadedness) and Jai Courtney (the main muscle, who also played the bully team-leader from Divergent, and the main muscle of the baddies in Divergent 2).

The lead female is played by Rosamund Pike (whose debut movie – after a handful of TV series stints – was playing Miranda Frost in Die Another Day, 2002).

This movie starts out slow and boring, but not impossible to watch since it’s clearly just warming up to something via a tedious, inefficient backstory. 10 minutes in, things clearly indeed appear to be warming up, as Liam Neeson‘s character Tom rings the police to confess to being a famous uncaught bank robber.

Half an hour in is when the action really kicks in though, as the FBI agents sent to investigate his confession find the money, then attempt to kill Neeson, then get surprised by their own boss and kill him while Neeson gets away in a bullet-showered car chase.

By 45 minutes in, Tom decides to attempt to clear his name before handing himself in, and by 60 minutes in, his girlfriend Annie (played by Kate Walsh) has been almost killed, and he goes on the attack against the two rogue agents.

The rogue agents themselves are played by Jai Courtney (from Divergent) and Anthony Ramos (from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts). Ramos’s character here has a conscience but is constantly led astray but his more psychopathic friend played Courtney, who by 70 minutes in (with 30 minutes to go) is pretty much a lone ranger, having alienated his partner in crime, his new boss, and of course Tom & Annie.

The old boss of the two rogue agents, who they soon killed, was played by Robert Patrick (the liquid metal antagonist called T-1000, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991). The new boss of these two agents, who gets tipped off by Tom, is played by Jeffrey Donovan with vibes like a cross between Clint Eastward, Jesse Enkamp and Magnus Carlsen.

A slightly clever ending somewhat saves this movie, solidifying its rating as better than merely Watchable. Indeed, I rate it So-So.