^Oh, and thanks for your helpful review Trekker
Mark this day in your calendars.
Finally someone gets bitched at because he
likes a film without going into details.
?!
I assume he was talking about the review I made a few days ago after seeing a screening. Where I did go into [some] details.
People who write off Tom Cruise movies without seeing them are some of the most foolish people this planet has to offer.
No, I don't agree. It IS possible to not like an actor and as a consequence of that avoid going to see his movies.
Maybe in the case of some other hack actor this is true. Not, however, in the case of Tom Cruise. Everything that guy touches is pure gold.
I thought you were smarter than that.
I would hardly say everything Cruise touches is pure gold. He's not an actor who I think has a lot of range as, well, usually in his movie he's playing himself which is usually a smirking jackass. He DOES have his moments, however, I've liked him most of the Mission Impossible movies and I lied him in this movie. But in many of his movies he's pretty hard to take as anything more than, well, a smirking jackass. Which I think a lot of his personal life bleeds into that.
I'm not passionately for or against the man's work, but he's never really impressed me. I'll usually only go see his movies if the movie itself looks worth watching enough to tolerate looking at Tom Cruise's mug for two hours. This movie? Had that. I would have paid to go see it even if I didn't get the screening tickets. Minority Report? I can't say that about, it didn't look interesting enough to put with Tom Cruise. (Though I did eventually see it and found the movie mostly mediocre.) I think Mission Impossible 2 suffers from "Tom Cruise-ism." Where as the first one and the most recent one do not suffer from too much of The Cruise.
He's just not a good actor. He has too parts he plays, either himself or not himself. Himself is a smirking jackass, not himself is a less smirking everyman. The smirking jackass shtick may have worked for him in his 20s but in his 50s? Not so much.
I think this movie offers the right levels of Cruise and something closer to what he should be doing. I did see a trailer in front of The Hobbit the other night for a movie of his coming up that looks pretty good. (I fail to recall what exactly the movie was, though.)
Anyway, I recommend this movie overall as I DID enjoy it and may be see it again in theaters. My only problem with it is that I don't the the stakes in it are high enough or matter enough to the main characters to make everything that happens in it worth it. It's a damaged narrative that maybe came across better in book form that was lost in translation.
It's a movie where Reacher could have failed in what he was doing and nothing would change or matter. Sure, an innocent man would have probably gotten the death penalty but I don't know how much that matters when the audience isn't given a chance to care about the supposedly innocent man. So why do I care if he's innocent or not? Hell, everything the movie tells me is that the guy was an unhinged jackass who probably should have been in prison anyway.
Take the movie "A Time to Kill" based on the book of the same name by John Grisham. In the movie and the book a black man's grade-school aged daughter is brutally raped and left for dead by two white rednecks. The men are eventually caught and are set to be put on trial. The father, played by Samuel L. Jackson on the movie, takes matters in his own hands. He believes that in the deep, racist, south he's in the two men will likely plea it out and not spend any time in jail so he guns them down. He's quickly caught and put on trial for a double homicide where our "hero lawyer" working out of a small, underfunded office must work to get him acquitted. (Played by Smirking Jackass #2: Matthew McConaughey)
In that movie there's some other layers to it, mostly dealing with the racist culture of this deep-south town. But our accused man we KNOW something about him. Sure, we know he killed these men in the very definition of The First Degree but we've some understanding of why and we kind of want Matthew McConaughey to win.
In this movie we don't quite have anything like this, we just sort of go on the word of the characters that the accused shouldn't get the death penalty even though we supposedly saw him savagely gun down several people in the opening of the movie. There's little reason to care about what has happened (even once the plot begins to unravel into a deeper conspiracy).
But, still, there's a lot of good moments in the movie and I enjoyed it, just wasn't very invested in the plot.
