When given the chance to admit guilt to Emerson and District Attorney Alex Rodin (Academy Award nominee Richard Jenkins), he simply writes "Get Jack Reacher" on the legal pad. We know he's not the guy, but no one else does. Emerson (David Oyelowo of Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Red Tails), to arrest James Barr (Joseph Sikora), a loner and former Army sniper. Six are dead and a gold mine of evidence leads the police, lead by Det. With no clear motive, he begins gunning down random citizens walking he riverwalk in front of PNC Park across the river. Jack Reacher begins with a steely unnamed assassin (newcomer Jai Courtney) perching himself in a downtown Pittsburgh parking garage and preparing a sniper rifle. If it can be worth your money and two hours, again, shouldn't that be enough.
Shouldn't that be enough? The second real question is whether the completed and compiled movie effort is entertaining. Tom Cruise's performance got the stamp of approval from Lee Child himself (who also has a quick cameo in the movie). The core of the character is in his decisive action and behavior as the formidable drifter he embodies. The first is whether Tom Cruise can portray WHO Jack Reacher is, not WHAT he looks like. There are two real questions fans and moviegoers should be asking when approaching Jack Reacher, from Oscar-winning writer-director Christopher McQuarrie ( The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie). Deal with it the same way the Comic Book Salesman from The Simpsons has to deal with a 6'2" singing and dancing Australian being a foot taller than a beloved Canadian mutant superhero with claws coming out of his hands. You're stuck with Tom Cruise, who does sell movie tickets.
Well, Thor was busy and Triple H doesn't sell movie tickets.
Unless Chris "Thor" Hemsworth puts down his Mjolnir hammer and gets a haircut or Jean-Paul "Triple H" Levesque puts down his sledgehammer and gets a hair cut, no one marketable in Hollywood matches Jack Reacher's description. Clearly, that is certainly not the brunette Tom Cruise, who tops out at 5'7" and maybe weighs 175 pounds soaking wet. According to Wikipedia and Child, Jack is described as 6'5" with a beefy 50 inch chest holding up a nearly 250 pound lean muscular frame, adorned with icy-blue eyes and dusty blond hair. When it comes to the character Jack Reacher, the fictional former United States Army Military Police captain created by British author Lee Child (the pen name for Jim Grant) and featured in 17 novels, Tom Cruise was definitely not the person the diehard fans had in mind. It's an impossible task of translation, compression, editing, and how filmable or unfilmable certain things on a page translate to the silver screen. As I often rant on this website, no movie will ever match the book 100% ever. In the case of graphic novels and comic books, gifted artists help flesh that vision out and it's up to Hollywood casting directors to take care of the rest. That's the individual joy of books in fostering imagination. From Harry Potter all the way to the upcoming 50 Shades of Gray movie adaptation , the dedicated book fans of those works commonly develop a mental picture of what they imagine their beloved characters to look like. When popular books and novels are turned into films, they attract a whole second audience of devoted fans and readers that join the general cinema audience.