Jack Reacher
Jan. 5th, 2013 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eleanorjaneAnd so, the spoilery commentary/thoughts:
It felt to me as though this movie didn't know what it wanted to be. It was paced like a crime/investigation story, with lots of tension and mystery and characters following clues and so on. The problem was that the audience already sees the plot twist, the whodunnit/howdunnit, right at the start of the movie, so watching the characters plod to the same conclusion is frustrating rather than engrossing. Similarly, there are too many instances of characters refusing to believe things that the audience knows to be true (and they wouldn't actually be hard to believe even if we didn't already know them), and stupidity-as-plot-device is tedious to watch.
The other really false note was the flirtation between the two lead characters (the female lead is Rosamund Pike playing Helen Rodin). They're obviously meant to be flirting, that is, but they had all the chemistry and sizzle of inert gases. In place of chemistry, the director just has Jack getting into Helen's personal space inappropriately (and honestly it just felt weird and creepy, not sexy), and then implying she wants to sleep with him. Honestly, it was probably the fakest-feeling action movie flirting I've ever seen; asexual aromantic genderless robots would have more chemistry than those two.
The movie is a total Bechdel fail, of course. There are three women - Helen, a young woman involved in the case who gets fridged at the end of Act 2, and a nameless mother who doesn't have any lines. Oh, plus four women who get shot as part of the case being investigated, but we only see them as corpses and in flashbacks, and of course none of them get any lines either. Needless to say, none of them meet, let alone talk to each other.
Oh, and Jack Reacher's too good; he fights like Special Forces Marine Recon Man, with ridiculous sniper skills to boot, but his backstory is that he's a retired military police officer. (Who is also apparently the best investigator ever and solves crimes no-one else can.) The fight scenes are laboured beyond belief, especially the first one, which is a blatant exercise in showing us that Jack Reacher Is The Coolest And Toughest Ever And Also Has A Bigger Dick Than You, and it's not even a good fight scene either.
Honestly, though, my biggest quibble was that the movie simply wasn't remotely engrossing. It felt, at every turn, that they were telling-not-showing; it felt inorganic, ploddy, and totally by-the-numbers. It never actually came alive. I don't know enough about the process of narrative construction and moviemaking, but I suspect this is a symptom of the conflict between the movie's crime-story pacing and action-movie narrative.
Verdict: even if you like dumb action movies (which I do), this movie commits the unforgiveable sin of being dull. Give it a miss.
(Caveat: I can't tell how much of my opinion of the movie is coloured by my distaste for Tom Cruise.)
It felt to me as though this movie didn't know what it wanted to be. It was paced like a crime/investigation story, with lots of tension and mystery and characters following clues and so on. The problem was that the audience already sees the plot twist, the whodunnit/howdunnit, right at the start of the movie, so watching the characters plod to the same conclusion is frustrating rather than engrossing. Similarly, there are too many instances of characters refusing to believe things that the audience knows to be true (and they wouldn't actually be hard to believe even if we didn't already know them), and stupidity-as-plot-device is tedious to watch.
The other really false note was the flirtation between the two lead characters (the female lead is Rosamund Pike playing Helen Rodin). They're obviously meant to be flirting, that is, but they had all the chemistry and sizzle of inert gases. In place of chemistry, the director just has Jack getting into Helen's personal space inappropriately (and honestly it just felt weird and creepy, not sexy), and then implying she wants to sleep with him. Honestly, it was probably the fakest-feeling action movie flirting I've ever seen; asexual aromantic genderless robots would have more chemistry than those two.
The movie is a total Bechdel fail, of course. There are three women - Helen, a young woman involved in the case who gets fridged at the end of Act 2, and a nameless mother who doesn't have any lines. Oh, plus four women who get shot as part of the case being investigated, but we only see them as corpses and in flashbacks, and of course none of them get any lines either. Needless to say, none of them meet, let alone talk to each other.
Oh, and Jack Reacher's too good; he fights like Special Forces Marine Recon Man, with ridiculous sniper skills to boot, but his backstory is that he's a retired military police officer. (Who is also apparently the best investigator ever and solves crimes no-one else can.) The fight scenes are laboured beyond belief, especially the first one, which is a blatant exercise in showing us that Jack Reacher Is The Coolest And Toughest Ever And Also Has A Bigger Dick Than You, and it's not even a good fight scene either.
Honestly, though, my biggest quibble was that the movie simply wasn't remotely engrossing. It felt, at every turn, that they were telling-not-showing; it felt inorganic, ploddy, and totally by-the-numbers. It never actually came alive. I don't know enough about the process of narrative construction and moviemaking, but I suspect this is a symptom of the conflict between the movie's crime-story pacing and action-movie narrative.
Verdict: even if you like dumb action movies (which I do), this movie commits the unforgiveable sin of being dull. Give it a miss.
(Caveat: I can't tell how much of my opinion of the movie is coloured by my distaste for Tom Cruise.)