The film Jack Reacher is worth seeing. It has the right mix of action and comedy. Despite what some critics say, the comedy is blatantly intentional. Tom Cruise does a good job with the character. The script is pretty straight forward and well paced. I’m not completely sold that it is a ‘must see in theaters’, but the car chase scene is pretty cool on the big screen.
The film is based on the book One Shot by Lee Child and the changes from the book appear to have been done mostly to streamline the story down to a more friendly 130 minutes compared to the rest of the Christmas competition (166 minutes for The Hobbit and 157 minutes for Les Misérables). A few characters were removed and details changed, but the primary narrative stays for the show.
Lee Child has an entire series of books written in the traditional grocery store thriller/page-turner format. There is plenty of material for further movies. Provided continued box office success, the series could be the building point for a ‘James Bond’ or ‘Jack Ryan’ type film series and I wouldn’t be upset. This is a good start, but as a fan of the books, I’m more interested to see some of the more exciting stories starring Reacher make it to the big screen, or perhaps a longer run-time episodic BBC mini-series like they’ve done with Sherlock.