![jack reacher review jack reacher review](https://cdn2.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9781787633742.jpg)
The disturbing opening - which, like much of the film, is shot and cut with taut precision - shows a sniper position himself in a parking garage across the water from Pittsburgh’s baseball stadium and methodically picks off what looks to be five random targets on the riverfront promenade. Jack Reacher, then, is all business, taking a break from whatever he does with the rest of his time to help solve a case that initially looks open and shut. Happily, Cruise plays him with no fuss in a direct, pared-down way with little sense of amped-up intensity or vanity he can even take a joke at his own expense, as when he’s stripped to the waist in a motel room, and Rosamund Pike says, “Could you put your shirt on, please?” In short, he’s a great male fantasy figure. He also is hard as nails physically, as he proves in fight after fight.
![jack reacher review jack reacher review](https://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/17169_5.jpg)
The central character, an Army vet and military policeman who knows all there is to know about weapons and hand-to-hand combat, possesses the same appeal as classic Western heroes - he’s a loner, self-sufficient, a man of few words who comes and goes without explanation - mixed with a touch of Philip Marlowe’s tough determination to peel back layers of deception and official cant to arrive at a satisfying form of justice. The British television veteran Child wrote his first Reacher novel in 1997 and since then has cranked out 16 more, of which One Shot, the basis for Jack Reacher, was the ninth.