Tom Cruise runs, solves mysteries, punches people and kills some bad guys. Welcome to "Live, die, repeat". Hold on, am I writing a "Mission Impossible" review? Yeah, they're all formulaic and interchangeable cutout action hero fare; Jack Reacher (2012) is no exception to the formula.
Basically, people have died and the killer is arrested within what feels like minutes. He is silent and only writes three words: "GET JACK REACHER". This Jack Reacher guy is a ghost, a phantom, he moves unseen and lives incognito except that he gets regular Western Union wire transfers to his name. So, nobody knows how to contact him but Tom Cruise has luckily read the script and knows it's his time to pop into the action right when other characters ask: "How do we find him?" Seriously, we're barely 10 minutes in and there's already a massive plot hole you could drive a helicopter through while chasing a train in a tunnel.
Hope you like the sound of JACK REACHER, because I'll write it out a couple more times before this text ends. The character of Jack Reacher is as obnoxious as the name would imply, by the way. We waltzes into the police station where the suspect is being held, only to be informed the guy is in a coma. So, this suspect conveniently wakes up at the very end to cry his eyes out for no reason because (spoilers) he didn't do it. Well, whodunnit?
I swear I am not making this up. An old WW2 Russian gulag prisoner is offing people whose businesses he wants to take over and also covering up their murders by also killing a bunch of random people around them. The guy is known as "Zek", an actual name for such people, and bit off his frostbitten fingers to avoid dying from gangrene. Brutal. He actually asks one of his minions to bite off his fingers too and the guy refuses so he gets domed with a silenced pistol.
Between Jack Reacher entering the movie and the showdown with Zek there's solid 2 hours of watchable dialog, action and discovery. There's a mole in the movie too, which of course there is and it all has to do with a quarter. You can see Jack Reacher twiddle quarters throughout the movie, which is only apparent on repeat viewings, which I do not recommend. Anyway, there's this love interest attorney but they don't actually exchange bodily fluids. There's a secondary love interest too, pictured below (click the image for 578,86 KB, a 1280x544px image):
The cute girl later gets killed, which is a shame. She and Jack Reacher meet in a bar through one of the cringiest conversations imaginable, where she is obviously trying to bait him into a scheme but he keeps telling her he isn't interested in a hooker. She starts pouting, gets mad and calls up 5 guys to pummel Jack Reacher. He deals with them but the police arrives within microseconds of him winning.
Basically, what ensues is a lot more idiocy, some investigation, a hilariously slapsticky fight in a bathroom that is surprisingly realistic and a final shootout in the dark. Jack Reacher actually defeats a guy with a gun using only a rock. I don't like the ending, since Jack Reacher literally executes Zek. If that was meant to be a twist, it's a terrible one. Anyway, the movie is only good if you like Tom Cruise and even then if you like him in his cutout action hero role.
A really dumb and mindless movie that throws in so many plot lines that don't get resolved. Why was Zek in the movie at all? I would expect other characters to explain the connection but it could literally be any other nationality and still work just as fine. The mole also had flimsy motivation for doing what it did. I just hope there's no cinematic universe because Jack Reacher is such a dull, bland character that can't win anything unless the script writers set it up for him.