Action Hero MoviesThis 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).