thread for the movie JACK REACHER (cruise, pike, herzog, duvall, dir. christopher mcquarrie)

Cruise is really f'n funny when he does the Sherlock Holmes routine. The rest of the movie is nothing that wasn't done better in the NRA "press conference" last week.

reacher books are waaaaaaaaaay into guns. fetishistically. makes and models and everything about them. reacher is an expert. so your mileage may vary as the kids like to say. doesn't bother me. i'm a fiction fan, not a gun fan. i like horror movies too.

you know he doesn't make a big deal about it or anything but reacher WAS the only non-marine to ever win the elite marine sniper competition in the history of the competition. hahaha! i love those books....

killing floor would make a brilliant movie

i think christopher ecclestone in '28 days later' mode woulda made a good reacher

mmm ecclestone

H4A OTM.

This was pretty entertaining, believe it or not.

it's sorta like 'a few good men' with way more assbeatings and car chases

my spidey sense told me it would own because of mcquarrie. way of the gun wasn't a great movie, but the filmmaking approach pushed all my buttons - patient and methodical with a wry, nasty sense of humor and some great visual storytelling moments. that sensibility mostly survives his mainstream debut intact, though obviously JR isn't as bloody or profane as WOTG.

statham would have been an improvement. my dad and i thought someone like liam neeson would have been perfect but he's too old. and after watching the walking dead this year i thought this guy would have been perfect:

noooo, no britishes playing this american he-man. it'd be like burt reynolds as james bond

'way of the gun' was a pretty tight flick, definitely imo better than 'the usual suspects'. super-controlled and methodical, otm, reminded me of johnnie to's 'the mission' a bit.

mcquarrie has his flaws but he's one of those guys who really seems to "get it" and operates within a particular method so well. his own directorial work (based on the single film i've seen, tbqh) is better than his writing for other folks.

reacher is german iirc? or quite a bit german

i tried watching WotG once but the opening 20 mins felt so deliberately pretentious I couldn't stand it

maybe I will give it another try

super-controlled and methodical, otm, reminded me of johnnie to's 'the mission' a bit.

― LIKE If you are against racism (omar little), Sunday, December 23, 2012 5:38 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sold

"noooo, no britishes playing this american he-man. it'd be like burt reynolds as james bond"

britishers play americans better than americans.

"reacher is german iirc? or quite a bit german"

his mom was french. but the whole nomad thing comes about sfter he leaves the army cuz he wants to see america after living overseas his whole life. (his dad was a career soldier overseas and then he spent 20 years in the army overseas)

ya he was in germany as a kid, is what i'm sayin tho

https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/282331192118886400

reviews are shitty, it consumed Newt Gingrich's full attention at the cinema, done

i borrowed this richard brautigan anthology once & on the back there was this quote from a guy from the nyt book review saying "these books are fun to read" & it just seemed like such an impossibly childlike & pure appreciation for a cultural text, one so slight it was hard to imagine someone who reviews books using it to proffer an endorsement, & i didn't think it could be topped until i imagined newt in a suit & tie with a bag of popcorn on his lap, smiling glassily with his head almost uncomfortably raised, like a ventriloquist's dummy, the reflected light of the screen casting dancing shadows on the soft curves of his face, never thinking about anything other than jack reacher for a whole movie

yeah im with you omar. i dont much like Usual Suspects either, but i think of it as a "cold shot" for his shit to come (little ref to the motion picture Jack Reacher, based on the book Jack Reacher, for u guys)

VG - it probably does come off as somewhat affected these days. i havent seen it in a long time. i think theres some good stuff in there if you stick with it though

darragh hes half-french, half-american, 100% reacher. iirc.

jack reacher, cosmopolitan

raised a child of the world

half frog, half yank...all man

called frank

lol

he feels like he doesn't know his country very well. so he's gonna kill his way through it and see the sites. it's pretty poetic.

Ugh, this movie. Almost didn't make it through to the end. Not much fun seeing a guy who is always the smartest and strongest in the room. (And I'm a fan of Haywire, Parker novels, etc.)

a reader of the books suggested Alexander Skarsgaard

My dick suggests Alexander Skarsgård for everything ever.

yr dick otm

I want .gifs of all the women in this movie making eyes at Jack Reacher.

my review: if you see this one on the shelves, "reach" for another movie

or "jack off"

wait.

k kinda stoked for this

actually like the books - started them when i ran out of parkers and wasn't too impressed by the first one but the second grew on me

i guess i like hyper-alert protagonists in my crime fiction

fun watch, really horrible first 20 mins or so

I'm chinese so I know real chinese food

I would have enjoyed seeing Dwayne Johnson in the role.

The Reacher books are ridiculously violent but almost always fun. Child keeps the crazy action moving forward at all times. In the books you get everything from Reacher's point of view (a few are in first person). Much of the entertainment comes from watching the wheels turn as he makes Holmes-like leaps of deduction or exhibits idiot savant tics like always knowing the exact time. His limited comprehension of non-military human beings is often played for laughs. I'm not sure how any of that comes across in the movie ... I'm afraid it might involve Cruise acting even more insufferable than usual.

His limited comprehension of non-military human beings is often played for laughs

He and Kubrick did this better in Eyes Wide Shut.

there's a lots of job stuff in the books. i, for some reason, like reading about people doing their jobs? because i am sick and this country has ruined me. i swear there was one book where they must have had 50 meetings in FBI conference rooms. they were constantly getting on and off elevators in washington dc. for some reason this soothes me. so many special angents in the books. and sheriffs. they're big on rank. and the differences between govt. agencies.

I have One Shot at my desk, I shall begin reading today

In one of the ones I read, Reacher was obsessed with the perfect cup of coffee - a mug was too big, so the coffee would cool off before he finished drinking it, but this one type of diner cup was too small...it came up like five times in the course of the book and went from weird to hilarious to maddening.

I would love a 90 minute movie of nothing but Tom Cruise and barista Steve Buscemi working on a perfect cup of coffee. Jamusch directing, obvs.

ya more procedurals please hollywood, let's have an imax new yankee workshop

not enough coffee drinking, and only one breakfast-eating scene

still, not as bad as I was afraid it would be

it would work better for viewing at home, where one could take a drink every time a female character gazes longingly at Reacher

the number of women who can barely restrain themselves from pawing at his pecs is pretty hilarious

this was a totally boring waste of time

iirc the no music car chase was ok i guess

ritically panned

I am halfway through the One Shot book and I kinda like it! It's a bit ugh in places but he's a v intriguing character

Reacher is 6' 5" tall (1.96m) with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds (100–115 kg). He has ice-blue eyes and dirty blond hair. He has very little body fat, and his muscular physique is completely natural (he reveals in Persuader, he has never been an exercise enthusiast).

― LIKE If you are against racism (omar little), Sunday, 23 December 2012 15:07 (3 weeks ago) Permalink

I'm sorry but this sounds so much like gay porn it's kinda ridic

Also lol/rmde that all his descriptions of women's clothing makes them sound like they're all dressed to mirror 80's porn scenarios; sexy librarian, sexy lawyer, party girl...it's so bad. I'm picturing them all with huge perms

lol i just saw this, it... wasnt good... but there were scenes where i kind of appreciated what they were trying to do i guess

Had no idea McQuarrie worked on Ghost Protocol. I just watched that tonight because I bought a Blu-Ray set of the first 5 M:I movies for $20 at Target. To me it felt absolutely like a Brad Bird movie: you could have animated every scene (especially the car chase through the sandstorm, using tracking devices) and put the Incredibles in and it would have worked just as well. And even the way the camera swept around the hotel room in Dubai was 100% Bird to me.

Yeah the movie is not v good. I watched it and Hanna last week and Hanna is so much fun

Oh yeah I loved Hanna. I coincidentally put on Ghost Protocol after I switched Reacher off and it hugely satisfied.

I own Hanna on DVD and could probably watch that once a week. That movie rules.

hold up, what now, how'd i miss this

I think it was secret until McQuarrie was doing press for Fallout - he doesn't fess up about his rewrite jobs, but Cruise had outed him so he was fine with going into details on one or two of the huge podcast interviews he did. IIRC he came on for a few weeks, some months into the shoot, & was restricted from writing reshoots on anything already in the can, but saw the locations and set designs for everything they hadn't gotten to. Within that he rewrote the Jeremy Renner character totally, threw out Bird's JJ Abrams-style mystery plot, changed the outcome of Michelle Monaghan's character, shot a load of second-unit action stuff to make the big UAE setpieces feed back into a new ending, and went off to another job.

(*I think it was in the six-hour Empire interview, but it's been taken off soundcloud, so yr on yr own)

On Ghost Protocol I came in on the middle of the shoot to do a rewrite of the screenplay, though they had already started the movie. I had to communicate with the entire staff to determine what I could and couldn't change, what sets had been built or struck, what scenes I could or couldn't reshoot. I learned so much about production being right there. ... The script had these fantastic sequences in it but there was a mystery in it that was very complicated. What I did was about clarity. The mystery had to be made simpler. It's like reaching into a sock and pulling it inside out. It's still a sock, still all the same pieces, but all put together in a different order.

Always se bullet. I don't understand.

quoted that because of the sock analogy, of course

Saw this one with family couple nights ago. Got to say that car chase in downtown Pittsburgh was a pretty good stunt scene. I think with how the shots were setup they were definitely going for that old 70s chase vibe.

ep 1 of season 2 is as surprisingly bad as season 1 was surprisingly good

incredibly hacky, hokey stuff

Yeah, it's not great so far. But they've posted 3 episodes, so I'll give it at least 1 more.

yerman as reacher is enough value to watch a few more but luckily its nit his acting that appeals

also look im just gonna ask....they cgi his face a *lot* right? im not just imagining that?

I think he just looks like that

idk s2e1 seemed fine to me?

if you take enough steroids your face just does that

happy to report episode 2 is back into the swing of things

ok im not imagining it

several of the faces are cgi rendered or enhanced in various scenes for no obvious reason

the food delivery kid in the failed drug deal sting in episode 4 looked like he was in the polar express ffs

It's common practice now to morph actor faces onto stunt doubles for fights but maybe they're also doing it for stand-ins just standing around so the actor can catch a few more Zs in the trailer?

its during like two line stand in actor roles as well as gairly iften for our main guy

mark ruffalos hulk is somewhat reminiscent

/fairly often/

catheter torture was uh…vivid lol

from the reachers i remember reading, season 1 book (killing floor?) was always the best ito how well it would translate to tv and after finishing s2 i think the source was a messy one to try to make work, but even at that they made a clumsy (hamfisted lol amirite) job of it

ends up being a lot of trailerable moments stitched together with very rushed and forced beats about why we care (we dont, or at least we shouldnt)

final showdown is particularly shite

6/10 im bored now, nealey actress and character 100% deserves a spinoff show now

Should have been Reacher, Nealy and Herc stopping a much smaller criminal plot. Reacher’s added team were dead weight.

i enjoyed the tension of the generic white small sassy guy being a total stick-on for a double cross for as long as it lasted but of course reacher couldnt have been seen to have been fooled that way either originally or in present day

btw if these things merit a comparative analysis (they dont i think) then season 2 mawkish sentimentality and trite refrains of the likes of u do not mess with the 100th (i dont think a single cast member over the whole show managed to deliver this line with anything except the disdain it deserved as a raison d'etre for the whole affair) i think that it veered far more heavily into the aviators, masturbation over uniform and frenz4lyfe after an armwrestle of tom clancy than the usually-quite-tight episodic cut and dried situational reacher novels (ofc they arent without some level of the above but not to the extent s2 in particular was)

I will happily watch yer man bulldoze his way through anything but this season was a slog. Obviously, the whole premise stretches credulity but it works best when it's isolated from the real world. This was way too real-world-adjacent and, despite the carnage, it never really felt like anything mattered or had consequences.

haven't seen the show but the neagley character that appears in a couple of the books is terrific and I always wished lee child had spun off a couple of books centred on her

Agreed. Persuader has been announced as the s3 book, fyi.