Jack Reacher

Christopher McQuarrie’s 2012 film is detective work in an action jacket. The middle stretch is almost entirely Reacher pacing out a firing position, counting rounds and examining a parking meter and a bag of golf balls, while the poster promises otherwise. The action was deliberately left without music. Composer Joe Kraemer has described keeping most of it unscored, since music only lands if silence comes first. Werner Herzog plays a quiet villain never shown as a physical threat, so anyone waiting for an opponent who could trade blows goes unserved. The novel it adapts dates from 2005, and the film first carried its title. Lee Child defended the casting at the time, then reversed himself in 2018, agreeing readers had been right about Reacher’s size and ruling out further films with Tom Cruise, and the role moved to television. The chase was not in the screenplay, where Reacher steals a car, drives a few blocks and crashes. Dialogue was shot by day with one crew, the chase at night with another. A good fit if you want the middle stretch spent measuring the firing position and the fights run with almost no music. Not for you if Reacher’s size in the novels does real work: in a hundred and thirty minute film, continuous action means one night of chase.