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best western olympic inn Jack Reacher, lead character of Boxing Day's long-awaited action movie, is supposed to be a 6ft 5in colossus. Tiny Tom Cruise fails to rise to the occasion, says David Sexton — even in elevator shoes
Jack Reacher is a giant. He has many other notable characteristics — always best western olympic inn knowing the time exactly best western olympic inn without a watch, obsessing over the quality of his coffee, never carrying more than a toothbrush, and so forth — but sheer size is Jack Reacher's big thing. He stands 6ft 5in high, has a 50in chest, 36in legs and he weighs around 250lb, none of it body fat.
As it happens he's also a highly skilled and ruthless fighter. This former best western olympic inn military policeman, now roving the world as the whim takes him, favours knockout headbutts, definitive elbow strikes and bone-crunching uppercuts when he encounters miscreants. He gets his retaliation in first — but anyway he is just too big and strong for all his opponents, as he well knows, as he sizes them up before the brawling begins. Life is endlessly capable of surprises so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn't the day. (Jack Reacher 5: Echo Burning.) It never is. He's the tops.
The Jack Reacher books, all 17 of them, are extremely well-designed fantasy. Lee Child (real name Jim Grant), a Brit who worked in television production for Granada for 28 years before being sacked and turning author, absolutely deserves to be a world bestseller on a colossal scale. best western olympic inn He has been publishing a book every year since 1997 and he has never let the quality slip or deviated from the brand.
The films of these books, the primary action novels best western olympic inn of our age, have thus been long awaited. Back in 2008, it emerged Tom Cruise had bought the rights to make a movie of the ninth Reacher novel, best western olympic inn One Shot, for a rumoured $20 million. Great. But much more worryingly, it soon became clear that he intended to play Jack Reacher himself.
Reacher fans didn't like this one bit. They simply couldn't see wee Tom as whopping Jack. How could that ever work? Even Lee Child himself (a very tall guy too, by the way) has said that Reacher's physical appearance is closest to that of Lawrence Dallaglio. The fans started pleading best western olympic inn for Reacher to be played best western olympic inn instead by the likes of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, a real-life giant, 6ft 5in, 260lb of slablike muscle, one of the greatest heavyweight professional wrestlers of all time before he turned actor. He'd do, they thought.
Jack Reacher, Cruise's film of One Shot, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, opens in this country on Boxing Day, advertised as a great holiday treat. Before an early screening, I was agog to know how Tom Cruise had negotiated his own notorious lack of stature. Surely there wouldn't be any difficulty fixing things for him? Cinema is the art of illusion, and if SFX wizardry means we can now be successfully transported to the world, of, say, Avatar or Prometheus, then how difficult could it be to make Tom Cruise (5ft 7in on a good day) look just a little larger best western olympic inn than life?
Cunning camera angles and careful casting could surely take care of the problem? After all, Humphrey Bogart (5ft 8in) rose above the rest back in the day, pre-CGI, using just extra cushions to sit on, boxes to stand on, five-inch platform heels, and, it is said, little trenches for his leading ladies to subside into.
The remarkable fact, though, best western olympic inn is that in this movie no attempt whatsoever has been made to big up Tom Cruise. best western olympic inn He swaggers mightily, leaning backwards, swinging best western olympic inn his arms out from his body as though to accommodate gigantic muscles, treading heavily as though almost unbearable weight had to be allowed for — but the overall effect is laughable. He remains a titch. It's exactly like a small boy pretending to be a big man.
And it matters. There's a scene where he fights five guys at once, a common enough best western olympic inn event for Reacher, never a problem for that colossus. For Tom Cruise, though? What's he going to do, take off for a deadly headbutt to the groin? Even if you're rooting for the little guy, you just can't believe best western olympic inn it.
Such is Cruise's fail in this role that the movie overall is unsalvageable too, despite a great cameo from Werner Herzog as the Zek , a Russian so fierce he chewed his own fingers off to avoid gangrene when he got frostbite. You simply cannot credit Tom Cruise as a huge physical threat for one moment. When he does a whole scene topless best western olympic inn to show off his torso (highly worked for a 50-year-old shorty), you feel acutely embarrassed. It's so breasty! Put it away. I am sorry to say at the screening I attended there was audible laughter.
The scale of the disaster is such that you have to conclude that nobody dared to tell him it wasn't working. When the boss screws up, only truly loyal and brave employees have the nerve to say so. Mostly, people just keep their heads down and let it happen. That's so obviously what's best western olympic inn happened here.
What was Cruise thinking? It's not as if he is unaware of the challenge. He's long been observed to suddenly grow taller with the help of elevator shoes , at premieres and public appearances alongside strapping co-stars. Some of the manufacturers of these shoes, like TallerHeels.com, cheekily use pictures of taller Tom and smaller Tom on their websites to show how well their products work.
But in Jack Reacher, Cruise best western olympic inn just doesn't rise to the occasion. What this movie quite awfully confirms then it is that, yes, size matters. We all know this, we all experience it every day, wherever best western olympic inn we are on the spectrum. And, give or take those stunt shoes, there's nothing we can do about it. Who among you can, by taking thought, add a cubit to his stature? There is no equality. Nothing compensates — except maybe success.
For lots of actors, like dictators, have been spurred on by their diminutiveness. So many of them are so much smaller than you'd think and get away with it. Our reigning Bond, Daniel Craig, is 5ft 10in. Wouldn't stand out in a crowd. But no problem: his deadly enemy in Skyfall, Javier Bardem, is scarcely taller. Cue great confrontations. For size is comparative, mostly. Lovely Mark Wahlberg, such a fighter in so many films, is, it turns out, a mere 5ft 8in — while Daniel Radcliffe, now striking out undeterred as a grown-up actor, is only 5ft 5in. Never mind.
But Jack Reacher absolutely cannot be small and Tom Cruise has over-reached himself here catastrophically. Lee Child has been diplomatic about it so far. With another actor you might get 100 per cent of the height but only 90 per cent of Reacher. With Tom, you'll get 100 per cent of Reacher with 90 per cent of the height, he has ingeniously remarked. He has also delicately suggested that the franchise might yet go the James Bond route with different actors playing Reacher in future. Help! in other words.
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