Review Roundup (12/20): JACK REACHER

Chuck Wilson, The Village Voice: "Logic is rarely the point in movies like this (and the novels that inspire them). There's much to enjoy here: a goofily funny hallway fight between Reacher and two thugs best described as "Dumb" and "Way Dumber"; the unlikely sight of revered film director Werner Herzog(Rescue Dawn; Cave of Forgotten Dreams) portraying an evil villain who chewed off his own fingers in a Soviet Gulag."

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: "Jack Reacher stumbles around looking for a unifying narrative tone, while the star soldiers on, offering up his generic action-hero stance of calm, opaque concentration."

Richard Corliss, Time: "Jack Reacher, the very ordinary new Tom Cruise thriller, may be a minor collateral victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage. Because it begins with this scene of a mass slaughter, shown from the gunman's point of view, the movie accidentally and automatically evokes obscene images of slain first-grade children. Those images will be in most Americans' minds for a while, certainly through the early run of the movie, which opens Friday. Popular entertainment, meant to relieve people of real-life cares by leading them into a fictional world, occasionally grazes against some national trauma. That is the case with Jack Reacher."

Peter DeBruge, Variety: "Whereas the hyperkinetic actor looks best on the run, Reacher is a slow-moving, six-and-a-half-foot enforcer -- the kind of guy Cruise should be outwitting, not playing."

The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Cruise might not be the 6-foot-5 rock described in the books, but he makes the title role fit him like a latex glove in a winning turn that could spawn a popular new franchise for the star, if public reaction to Christopher McQuarrie's film is as strong as its fun quotient warrants...At least in terms of his action-film portfolio, Cruise is in top form here; if he feels like working really hard as a star and producer."

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