Who Should Have Played Jack Reacher
The new thriller Jack Reacher finds star Tom Cruise in comfortable territory as an extremely capable action hero trying to solve the mystery behind a series of sniper attacks. (Watch a trailer for Jack Reacher below.) But fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher book series — 13 installments published between 1997 and 2012, with more to come — have been up in arms about the casting of Cruise as the film’s titular hero, and they may have a point; the 5-foot-7 brunette actor with the toothy grin doesn't exactly resemble the 6-foot-5 blonde described by Lee Child in his novels. Is Cruise miscast?
Yes, Cruise is all wrong for Jack Reacher: Fans of Child’s bestselling series are absolutely right, says Jam! Showbiz: “Hiring a Hobbit-sized Hollywood actor to play giant Jack was a serious error.” Cruise simply lacks the physicality the character and story require. Just as problematic: The actor's inability to convey some of Reacher’s other defining characteristics; Cruise's “attempts at quick-quip comedy” with leading lady Rosamund Pike fall flat. Cruise is a fine actor, but in Jack Reacher he’s supposed to be “gritty and tough in a more ‘realistic’ world,” and he’s simply out of his depth.
“Jack Reacher comes up short”
Jeff is an avid fan of the Reacher series and is determined to bring it to life. Having a great personality, admirable confidence, and self discipline, Jeff Bosley is the obvious choice to play Jack Reacher. Joe Klauser. 2 years ago. edited The only Guy I can see in the role is Jeff Bosley. Jack Reacher is a fictional character and the protagonist of a series of crime thriller novels by British author Lee Child. After leaving the US Army as a major in its military police at age 36, Reacher roams the United States taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone who could play the role:Jack Reacher’s writer and producer brainstormed every major name in Hollywood, but no one seemed to fit the bill, reports the Los Angeles Times. “Realizing Hollywood is basically bereft of blond-haired, blue-eyed, 6-foot-5 actors who carry enough star power to ‘open’ a movie,” screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and producer Don Granger decided to make the character’s height their lowest priority. Instead, “they created a graph of the industry’s leading men, grading them on the character’s other core attributes: charm, eloquence, physicality, and gravitas.” When they settled on Cruise, Lee Child gave the actor his blessing as well, saying 'Why wouldn't I want the biggest star in the world to play my character?' Tom Cruise may not look like Jack Reacher, but he may have been the best choice anyway.
“Is Tom Cruise big enough to carry Jack Reacher?”
And Tom Cruise and Jack Reacher have more in common than you might think: Yes, Cruise isn’t huge or blond, but he manages to nail Reacher’s “meticulous calculation during combat, demonstrating swift moves determined by careful thought and aggressive plotting,” says Celebuzz. Reacher is “an American gypsy,” traveling from town to town and getting drawn into conflicts — “not terribly unlike Cruise’s chosen profession of traveling between locations getting into fake adventures.” And Cruise has experience playing the type: Reacher is quiet and emotionally distant — “a more grounded, everyday version” of Mission: Impossible hero Ethan Hunt.
“Tom Cruise vs. Jack Reacher: How similar are the movie star and his latest character?”
Consensus: It’s far from his best role, but Tom Cruise manages to turn in a satisfying performance as Lee Child’s hero in Jack Reacher — even if the film itself isn't quite up to snuff.
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is back with the release earlier this month of The Midnight Line, the 22nd book in the series. The Reacher books are hugely popular, but fail to garner much in the way of critical respect. Here are five reasons why the public love Reacher and why critics should…
Jack Reacher
Reacher is without a doubt one of the most original, complex and compelling characters in crime fiction. An ex-military policeman turned drifter, he has nothing tieing him to the world except for his relentless (and almost psychopathic) desire for justice. He’s the archetypal existential avenging angel – John Wayne, Bogart and Brando rolled into one.
Who Will Play Jack Reacher
Plot
People often assume the books are full of gymnastic fight sequences and pyrotechnic car chases but Reacher is far closer to Sherlock Holmes than he is to James Bond. In Night School, for instance, there are approximately four pages of fighting – a total of one per cent of the novel. The joy of a Lee Child novel doesn’t consist in adrenaline-fuelled thrills but in watching Reacher’s Spock-like logic shred through the narrative.
Prose
Recently, there’s been a fad for articles in which commentators admit to loving the books but hating the prose. Child is a deliberate stylist and his prose is taut, dynamic and highly-sprung. The sentences have a rhythmic sophistication lacking in most other bestsellers and a minimalism that is highly conceptual. The opening of Without Fail is a perfect example of this: “They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren’t ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because no one noticed.” The way each sentence suggests the next mirrors the inexorable unfolding of fate and plot and plays a large part in making the books so compelling.
Location
Lee Child’s novels ooze a sensuous, smoky Americana. Whether he’s describing grain elevators, neon signs or motel facades, Child effortlessly conjures up the stark eeriness of the American Midwest, making him the poet laureate of the prairies par excellance.
Actors Who Should Have Played Jack Reacher
Justice
The Reacher books are Westerns in disguise and this goes a long way to explaining why they are so phenomenally popular. The books resonate with the inherent mythic compulsion of the Western genre and Reacher is the classic silent stranger who rides into town and saves the small folk from rapacious bullies. In a world spinning out of control, where no-one and everyone is the bad guy, Lee Child’s novels provide an illusory but necessary reassurance.
Lee Child and Tom Cruise attend a screening of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (Getty)
If you’ve never read a Jack Reacher novel before, here five of the best to try…
Reacher, recently made redundant from the Army, drifts into a small Georgia town and is immediately arrested and accused of murder. Unusually for Reacher, this debut case is personal, the first murder victim being his own brother. It is also one of only six Reacher novels narrated in the first-person. Child’s unique style hasn’t fully coalesced yet but the plot is phenomenal and the scene in the jailhouse will stalk your nightmares for a long time.Playing with tropes of the Kennedy assassination, this sixth instalment finds Child in full possession of his talents with razor sharp sentences and one of his most baroque and serpentine plots.This was adapted for the first Reacher film and rightly so. It’s location of Indianapolis is a stroke of genius – a gunman loose in the bland, bleak heartland of suburban America. Child relishes in descriptions of highway overpasses, deep dark garages and rowdy sports bars. The bad guy (played with a chilling malevolence by Werner Herzog in the movie) is one of Child’s creepiest creations.Another rare outing for first-person Reacher. The shift of POV isn’t merely a gimmick but lets the reader into Reacher’s thought processes as he comes across a suicide bomber on the New York subway. Like all Reacher novels, at the heart of this thriller is a complex, intricate mystery.Child returns to the heartland, this time the endless prairie sea of Nebraska. An archetypical western with a fine sense of landscape, this also has one of Child’s darkest twists as well as set pieces of Hitchcock-like ingenuity and flair.Stav Sherez is crime novelist published by Faber & Faber. His latest novel, The Intrusions, is published in February