9. “Jack Reacher”
Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie have been best buds for a few years now. It started circa 2008 when Cruise was considering several projects, but all the scripts had to be tweaked and tailor made for the star (natch). One of the scripts was “The Tourist,” which Johnny Depp would eventually star in and McQuarrie redrafted for the chosen one. One that actually got made with Cruise in the lead was “Valkyrie” directed by Bryan Singer and McQuarrie is even credited as a writer of Cruise’s latest “Edge of Tomorrow.” But their 2012 collaboration “Jack Reacher,” an adaptation of Lee Child’s “One Shot,” feels as if the star and filmmaker got together and said, “what if we made a ‘70s-style action film with an anti-hero protagonist that plays by his own rules and is above the law?” Thus “Jack Reacher” is about an ex-military policeman turned temporary homicide investigator only because an accused, seemingly guilty sniper has asked for him by name cuing up the conspiracy that unravels when the relentless Reacher turns up. Plotting in the movie is grossly convoluted, it’s full of expository montages designed to hide the fact that it’s really just an excuse for Reacher to kick ass. Cruise’s tough guy character essentially amounts to: when a situation is unfair, when someone is being mean, Jack Reacher will show up out of nowhere to even the score (like beating up dudes who slap around their girls, because That’s Not Cool). That said, the action is pretty good, the film’s car chase is taut and well-orchestrated (though a bit overlong) and its sniper/shootout sequence in the end is also very commanding and well assembled. The bright spot of the movie showing up at the 2/3rds mark is the inclusion of Robert Duvall as an old sniper/war veteran who helps out Reacher, while the should-be-a-bright-spot-of-the-movie-but-isn’t is a ridiculous Werner Herzog as a Teutonic villain. All in all, it’s a bit ironic that the screenwriter-turned-director puts an emphasis on action and set-pieces and a pretty low premium on character and story. Look out, McQuarrie is next set to potentially damage the “Mission: Impossible” series, as he’s on board to direct episode 5.
What Does Cruise Jump Off And How High Is It? There are many levels on which “Jack Reacher” can be counted as a disappointment, and the almost total absence of Cruise jumping off stuff has to be one of them. Head stompings, fistfights and even eye-gougings abound, but Cruise remains resolutely earthbound. His Reacher, a little like the movie, has feet of clay.
8. “Oblivion”
Let it stand for the record that several contributors have made a case for “Oblivion” deserving better than the ignominy of seventh place on the basis of its aesthetics alone. But the glossiness of the visuals, all sleek hyperdesigned whites contrasted against the ruined planet below and the mix-and-match tech of the rebels only serves to highlight the derivative emptiness of the story it’s all in service of: almost every single element of “Oblivion” has been done more convincingly and with more soul, in another film before. A narrative mash-up of “Wall-E,” “Dune,” “Moon” and “Total Recall,” among many others, Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to “Tron: Legacy” is an improvement on that first bite at the bright, white sci-fi cherry, but despite a more involving story and a central character who should actually have some purchase on our sympathy, it’s just as instantly forgettable (honestly we did a double take just recalling that Olga Kurylenko is even in this). Andrea Riseborough can come out of it with her head held high; other worthy actors like Morgan Freeman, a screen-bound Melissa Leo and a surplus to requirements Nikolaj Coster-Waldau don’t fare so well, and Cruise himself is unusually bland, mostly because it feels like the director is barely interested in his human actors, more concerned with how the funky motorbike thingies look and how live-action “Jetsons” he can make the apartment seem. There’s potential for a more engaging film in the particular combination of familiar elements–post-apocalypse, humans vs machines, conspiracy, rebellion, self-sacrifice etc–but Tom Cruise Star vehicle no XX-903 just feels, if you’ll forgive, like a clone of other, much more worthwhile films.
What Does Cruise Jump Off And How High Is It? There’s a lot of falling and jumping throughout “Oblivion” most notably off the amazingly sleek “Sky Tower,” a glass home in the clouds that sits on a spindly platform 3,000ft above the earth’s surface, to which Cruise descends in a similarly lovingly designed “bubble ship.” But he also jumps down off dunes, and motorbikes and falls through holes in the earth which open into massive underground lairs which give the opportunity for, and perhaps only exist because of, some nice lighting effects.
7. War of the Worlds
Less a pure action movie than many films on this list — it’s a tripod of sci-fi, action and disaster — 2005’s “War of the Worlds” was Cruise’s second collaboration with Steven Spielberg, adapting the classic HG Wells novel for the umpteenth time and shifting the action forward a century and across the Atlantic to where Cruise plays an implausible blue-collar everyman. Much less fun than actioners like the “Mission: Impossible” series – but then, that’s the breakdown of human civilization in the face of a merciless alien threat for you – it doesn’t really manage to achieve the dramatic strength it was aiming for either. Cruise’s character has little dimension to him (beyond the compulsory Spielbergian failed marriage) and Dakota Fanning‘s spectacularly thankless role as his daughter who has more screams than dialogue. As an alien film from the man who made “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” it’s also a disappointment, with the invaders having no personality or presence (and in the end their defeat is anti-climactic, though that’s on Wells). In fact, the most compelling parts don’t feature the invaders at all: they’re the scenes of mass panic and social breakdown early on, which feature jumpy, eye-level photography from Spielberg’s regular DP Janusz Kaminski. These sequences were supposedly inspired by the amateur footage of 9/11, and like so many of the other “post-9/11” disaster movies the resonance isn’t really there, especially as the film also goes out of its way to avoid any over-familiar shots of major landmarks blowing up. Still, those scenes are effective on their own terms, and Industrial Light and Magic do their usual impressive work on the alien tripods when they do show up. In the end though, it’s a forgettable part of Cruise’s back catalogue, a competent but undistinguished and unfocused film that does nothing new with a story which, as Orson Welles taught us back in 1938, works best on radio.
What Does Cruise Jump Off And How High Is It? You can tell this is a more serious entry by how few things Cruise gets to jump off/fall from; we don’t even see him hit the water after the ferry overturns. Though at the film’s climax, he does get taken up into a cage-thingy with a group of other humans, including his daughter, which is suspended from one of the massive “tripods” and which, when Cruise’s grenade delivery brings down the beast, does then fall to the ground. Still, not a high point in the history of Cruise descending from high points.