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

btw McQuarrie now signed on to make another two Missions b2b, making seven Cruise vehicles in a row for him (and ten total)

hes a good handler for the lil fella

yeah this feels like good news

maybe one day they’ll give McQuarrie a Bond film?

i mean, once he’s released from Cruise servitude

gotta keep Tom busy to keep him out of trouble and not making public comments about scientology

true

praise xenu for mcquarrie’s service

maybe one day they’ll give McQuarrie a Bond film?

since they replaced the Hodge / Boyle script for the next one with the regular hacks, I can’t see the reins being handed on purpose to someone who’s good at both action & franchise management

also the Bonds suck so much now that it would be a step down for him. if Chris Morgan ever feels like opening up his solo credit on the already room-written Fasts though, McQuarrie’s gift for combining multiple setpieces, twist reveals & clear emotional throughlines should sell itself to Vin easily

(though one suspects McQ couldn’t hack working with him on a second one)

would it kill u to let me dream

Don't hurt me but I'd love to see a Russell T Davies Bond

Which is to say, I like McQuarrie and the IM films, but he's not kinky enough for Bond

jesus christ

i've "seen" reacher 2 three times because i watched it in earnest once, and then put it on so that i could fall asleep on the couch a couple times

it's an action movie so rote and uneventful that if i pay attention to it, i fall asleep within the first half hour

RTD Bond starring Hugh Grant. (He can fuck Whishaw again.)

i feel queasy

MODS

a russell t davies bond u say

i think i need to lie down

ALL of the leads of The Inbetweeners play bad guys this time

Barrowman = Felix Leiter, obvs, and then Geoffrey Wright can be Bond. In the next movie everyone swaps roles again.

Barrowman =

OK I'm out again

Reacher 1 is better than any post-Casino Royale Bond flick, why sully this thread by bringing up a recently inferior franchise.

I haven't read the books but the Reacher movies do understand that we don't need to know a whole lot about Jack Reacher, which is overall an excellent stance

Put in JR1 tonight and couldn’t believe how boring it was, turned it off 50min in after there had been one (1) brief fist fight and 49.5min of Tom Cruise trying to solve a fuckin mystery, idgaf just punch ppl already.

That being said, the “I was sandy... last week at the beach” is truly one of the greatest dumb clunker lines in movie history, Wiseau-level genius. Very curious if that diamond was in the book or if Oscar-winning screenwriter McQ came up with it.

McQuarrie also came on MI: Ghost Protocol midway through production to rewrite & 2nd-chair direct

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

Fight Club-era Holt McCallany would be a good J-Reach.

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.