ongoing 

   Let me take you back to “Interview with a Vampire.” Loved the book by Anne Rice. (Pre-idiotic and all-consuming vampire craze of today, a better breed of vampire, mind you). But Tom Cruise is cast as Lestat the lead vampire! Tom Fucking Cruise. Rice howls at the casting choice. Fans like me echo it. The movie? Well, I go into it thinking “harrumpth” and it rocks. Cruise nailed it. Skip ahead to today. Lee Child has penned 17 thrillers featuring the tall, rangy, terse ex-military cop Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise is cast as Reacher. (He’s also the co-producer.) Fans howl. Child equivocates. Movie comes out. Cruise nails it. He is Reacher, completely believable even though he’s a foot shorter. Doesn’t matter. He inhabits this guy, willfully cut off from the world at large, a drifter who encounters perilous situations (against his will or better judgment) and comes out victorious. The problem with “Jack Reacher” is, of course, timing, as many a mainstream critic has noted. (Nothing against mainstream critics: I am/have been one for many years.)

      The movie opening came a week after the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 schoolchildren and the movie starts from a sharpshooter’s point of view, as he scans, through the scope, his potential targets. It’s not a quick shot. His scope moves back and forth, up and down. He finds his targets and fires away – quick. Five dead in a matter of seconds, and I can’t think anybody at the advance screening I saw it with who didn’t think Sandy Hook. Just like when we saw the third “Batman” we didn’t think the Aurora theatre shootings. I’m not sure, though, that this is the place to weigh movie violence v. real life violence or the horror of coincidence. I’m not saying there isn’t some causal relationship and I’d add video game violent realism, easy access to assault weapons and mental illness (and lack of recognition/treatment/coverage) to the mix. What is especially disturbing  in “Jack Reacher” is the intensity of that violence (and more to come). The sound, as in most modern movies, is amped up high, the bullets figuratively richocheting around the theatre from speaker to speaker, 110 dB plus, I’d guess. You do feel like you’re in the middle of it all and that, I suppose, is part of the point.

     I was a fan long ago of “The Wild Bunch,” partly because Sam Peckinpah showed that shoot ‘em up cowboy killings hurt. It wasn’t just some guy falling off his horse clutching his chest. And I’ve been, with a reluctant, heavy heart, in favor of these kind of depictions. I’m thinking, too, to Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and how that felt or, even further, how the psycho terror in Wes Craven’s original “Last House on the Left” came off. It felt like cinema verite, not clever movie-making trickery. And while “Jack Reacher” employs clever trickery, it feels real. It’s a gritty thriller flick, certainly dismissed by many critics – who’ve seen way too many movies - as a middle-of-the-road action movie. But I would disagree. I think there’s a high tension wire pulse that courses through it and when you meet Werner Herzog, as the aging, decrepit, morally bankrupt mastermind called the Zec, well, you’re not gonna think he’s the guy that gave us “Encounters at the End of the World” or “Cave of the Forgotten Dreams.” (The documentary director that is.) But Herzog the fictional director gave us “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Nosferatu, the Vampire” -  so you know that man understands evil.  And he may not be a Hannibal Lecter but he’s damn chilling and repulsive as the ultimate evil businessman moving from town to town and “acquiring” construction companies and contracts through, uh, coercion.

     But what about Cruise? Terse, hardened, cryptic, doing his best to remain uninvolved in the scenario he’s dragged into …. Just like Child’s books. The premise here is that the sniper who is caught through circumstantial evidence is not the killer. We know that because we see the face of the killer (before we know him) and we see the face of the suspect who’s been carted in. Thing is, the suspect was a sniper, during the Afghan conflict and had a tour-ending outburst of sniping. We and he knows he’s capable of such violence. When he’s arrested, all the does is scrawl a note about contacting Jack Reacher, not that anybody knows who or where this off-the-grid Reacher fella is. The suspect is also beaten into a coma on his transport to a holding cell (thus, the hospital) so he can’t tell us any more.

    Reacher comes into play and slowly pieces together the puzzle. Not without a high degree of conflict and potential romantic engagement with defense attorney Helen (Rosamund Pike) and her father D.A. Rodin (Richard Jenkins). There’s fights, “Bullit-y” car chases, gun play – all quite in your face. But why don’t we stop the plot description here. Whenever I read about movies I try to get an idea of the plot and the vibe, but not know too much, so as to spoil the plot developments, so I’ll honor that here. The main point is to say readers of the books will not be disappointed, nor will non-readers out to discover this character. And we Cruise disbelievers, we’ll just have to swallow another one and tip our hat.

Times and prices?

www.boston.mrmovietimes.com