Butler's Cinema Scene

“JACK REACHER” My rating: C (Opens wide on Dec. 21)

130 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Jack Reacher” introduces Tom Cruise as the title character of Lee Child’s hugely popular series of crime thrillers about a former military cop who drops off the grid, surfacing every once in a while to solve some particularly egregious crime, and then vanishing once more.

Already some fans of Child’s books are in an uproar, since the Reacher of the novels stands well over six feet and weighs in at the low 200s…and Cruise is notoriously short and trim.

Never having read any of the Reacher mysteries, I find that argument about as interesting as the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But having seen the film, I think there’s a real question of whether we’ll ever see another Jack Reacher movie.

It’s not that the picture  — written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (he wrote “Valkyrie” for Cruise and will direct him in the next “Mission: Impossible” entry) – is awful. It just isn’t much of anything at all.

In a stomach-turning (especially given recent events in the national news) opening, a lone sniper takes up position in a Pittsburgh parking garage, aims his rifle across the river and proceeds to randomly blow away five persons strolling or sitting in a park a quarter-mile away.

The cops quickly arrest a former army sniper named Barr (Joseph Sikora), discovering in his home the murder weapon and all sorts of corroborating evidence. Barr refuses to talk, but before he’s beaten senseless by fellow prisoners, he demands that the authorities find Jack Reacher.

Rosamund Pike, Tom Cruise

Actually, Reacher finds them, having heard about the shootings and arrest on TV. As an MP in Iraq Reacher had occasion to deal with Barr (who inconveniently is in a coma). Now Reacher is improbably hired by Barr’s attorney, Helen (Rosamund Pike), to investigate the case.

What he uncovers is an elaborate frame-up, one that suggests the shootings weren’t at all random, and a conspiracy that may reach high into the ranks of Pittsburgh law enforcement.

There’s a good deal of action here, including a “Bullitt”-ish car chase through the nighttime city and a climactic shootout in a rock quarry, as well as regularly occurring dustups between Reacher and various thugs, whose street brawling is no match for the skills of this astonishingly calm government-trained killer.

Cruise’s Reacher is a loner who owns no car or credit cards, uses public transportation, never flies (all that check-in security, you know), and even eschews cellular technology (it’s traceable) for pay phones.  He’s also a man of few words, though he can come up with a killer verbal putdown when the situation requires. This is a skill that generates laughs and releases tension.

But there’s clearly some star adulation at work here, for hardly does Reacher exchange a word with an attractive woman before she starts going weak in the knees. This phenomenon extends even to Helen the lawyer, who is played by Pike with deer-in-the-headlights vacancy and a mental sluggishness that puts those of us in the audience several steps ahead of her.

The cast is rounded out by the ever-solid Richard Jenkins as the local D.A. (and Helen’s semi-estranged father), David Oyelowo as a homicide cop, Jai Courtney (of TV’s “Spartacus”) as a cool professional assassin, Robert Duvall as the good ol’ boy operator of a shooting range and, in a deliriously goofy bit of casting, filmmaker Werner Herzog as a reptilian Eastern European gangster with one milky eye.

“Jack Reacher” is an adequate time-killer. And that’s about it.

| Robert W. Butler