Jack Reacher may be in trouble. The film adaptation of author Lee Child's popular novels drew the ire of Reacher fans when the diminutive Tom Cruise came aboard to play the 6" 5' barrel-chested antihero , and while many(including yours truly) figured the clamor would die down, it never really did. In fact, it's only gotten worse as more of the film has been revealed.
A new Jack Reacher trailer has been released, and it suffers greatly from Cruise's less than imposing stature. Reacher is meant to be an intimidating figure, a stone cold bruiser investigating a sniper's killing spree, but Cruise makes this look like a standard actioner. Even worse, he makes Reacher look like just another guy. That's not to say the trailer is bad. It's perfectly fine for a genre film, and Werner Herzog should be insane as the bad guy, but there's little that separates it from the pack during a crowded December month.
Child has been quite vocal in defending the choice of Cruise, saying recently in an interview that the actor embodies all of Reacher's personality traits, at expense of the physical one. That's all well and good, but I think the real reason Cruise was picked is that he's close to writer/director Christopher McQuarrie(Valkyrie), and that his star power ensured the film would get made.
Whether or not audiences turn out to see Cruise in action will be revealed when Jack Reacher opens on December 21st....
