Jack Reacher: The Joke's on You?

"Oh, I'm serious...snicker...DEAD serious"

Jack Reacher is ridiculous. The character and the movie.

As essentially the illegitimate child of Tropic Thunder, Grindhouse, Knight and Day, and Last Action Hero, it brings all those wonderful parodies of under-cooked action thrillers to life in a way that is so gloriously tongue-in-cheek in its late 80s/early 90s aesthetic and construction that it will undoubtedly leave most of their audience scratching their heads and asking: "Is this a comedy or an action flick?" The answer is both, yet Jack Reacher is so much more than that. It is, in fact, the latest stop on Tom Cruise's "Pardon My Madness" Tour in which he gleefully acknowledges that he is probably glib, smirking, nutcase who takes himself a bit too serious, but not serious enough to make fun of himself and the disposable entertainment he's made for the past few decades.

Jack Reacher is, by my count, the second film, the similarly eponymous Alex Cross being the other, this fall to attempt to recapture the spirit of thriller adaptations that kind of ruled the screens in the late 90s and kept Ashley Judd employed. Directed by new Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, Reacher revolves a basic mystery killer plot that kicks of with a extremely tense opening that may be challenging for some viewers to digest in light of the Sandy Hook tragedy and one that surely would have got this movie pulled when the D.C. Snipers were terrorizing the streets of our fair Prince George's and Montgomery Counties. When the police nab the perfect suspect, Tom Cruise, or Jack Reacher--same difference--shows up to reluctantly, at first, take the case. Now, I'm not at all familiar with Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, but word on the'net is that Reacher looks more like Arnold Schwarzeneger than Tom Cruise. That said, Cruise swallows this role in so-much of his persona that it doesn't matter what Reacher was supposed to look like; he is Tom Cruise, no way around it. The rest of the flick plays out with a pretty standard litany of cliches and tropes, all wrapped around a mystery that is telegraphed in the first fifteen minutes, which is to say: there is no mystery--at all. Yet, the narrative is irrelevant to an astonishing degree because this is essentially another edition of the Tom Cruise Show, played tot he hilt in a way we haven't seen since the rise of Les Grossman.

Cruise is playing the same character he has been playing for years, only amped to an absurd degree that is similar to how Denzel Washington has consistently amped his decade-long performance of Alonzo Harris, and I appreciate it more in this film than I have in any of Cruise's films from the past five years. Cruise's Reacher is an unrepentant smartass who is clearly the smartest and toughest guy in the room, no matter what. If you are his enemy, you cannot hope to defeat him or outsmart him. If you are a woman, regardless of your affirmed sexual orientation, you will never resist him. Thus, Reacher becomes an exercise in full-tilt movie star  worship, not unlike this summer's Rock of Ages. But, why does Reacher work where Rock of Ages flopped? Simple, most members of the audience are accustomed to an audacity that borders on the stupidity in action movies. That audacity allows Michael Bay to 360 and  demolish his way to box-office gold with crap like Transformers; it is the same audacity that enabled Arnold Schwarzeneger to rule the box office for years despite some often questionable charisma. We suspend our disbelief so fully when we watch these broad far-reaching action flicks that we enter into a sort of "uncanny valley" where we no longer shirk from the absurdity and embrace it because it exists so far out of recognizable reality--a phenomena certain movie stars [coughTomCruiseWillSmithDenzelWashingtonNicolasCageetccough] are also experiencing--and taps into a subconscious desire, among most but not all, to become snarking badasses. Then, the flick laughs at us for thinking that way, and we laugh too, mostly because it's damned entertaining to see someone spit out lines like "I'm going to beat you to death then drink your blood from a boot"--which joins the hallowed ranks of lines like "King Kong ain't got $#!+ on me" and "Mahalo, motherf@#$er"--with just the right amount of winking and conviction.

Ultimately, that delicate balance between parody and ham-fisted seriousness, which is found in spades in Jack Reacher, will confuse a good chunk of audience. Many folks will go into Reacher expecting an action movie, and they will get that, albeit one that is decidedly retro in its aesthetic and narrative structure and generally middle of the road in terms of action. But, they will also find a phenomenally intentionally and unintentionally hilarious send up of contemporary actioners built around Holmsian supermen as well as a pretty stinging, if again unintentional  dig at Tom Cruise movies, in the vein of Knight and Day--only this time we, and the wide-eyed leading lady (Rosamund Pike) actually see the action. When viewed through this lens, Jack Reacher appears to be an elaborate joke, one that you need at least cursory knowledge of Cruise's oeuvre to truly understand. Indeed, it's possible that I may be the only who gets the joke, but I highly doubt it as audiences are always far smarter than Hollywood gives them credit for. Thus, going into Jack Reacher with the understanding that it is essentially a long gag, a false movie brought to life with only the barest of plots and cheapest action but a preponderance of earned and unearned laughs, will lead to surefire enjoyment, the likes of which have not been seen since another movie bait and switched seriousness for unintentional  and lasting hilarity. That equally thinly plotted and ridiculously cliched yet eminently enjoyable movie: Training Day.