So, Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” character is coming to the big screen. Sort of. In One Shot (trailer below), Tom Cruise is inexplicably cast as Jack Reacher. WTF?!?
No, seriously: WTF?!?
The Character, as established by Child in–I think–17 novels is 6’5″, 250 pounds of phlegmatic, unstoppable force. I can think of exactly NO “negotiation” (read, “Reacher utterly destroys the bad guys in hand-to-hand, or head-to-face-butt”) scene in any of the books that a guy Tom Cruise’s size could survive, let alone wreak the havoc the Reacher character does.
And then there’s personality. The quirky, birdlike Cruise twitching from one girly-voiced dialog delivery to another is hardly the image of the laconic, phegmatic Reacher portrayed in so many successful novels to date. Absolutely nothing in the trailer, for instance, seems congruent with the Reacher character in the books.
I imagine those who have never read any of the books and have a crush on Pretty Boy Cruise will enjoy the thing, but while I applaud the fact that Lee Child is going to make some big bucks off the thing, I kind of wish he’d played the part of Reacher himself. It’d have been at least a little more believable.
