In one horrible scene, he demands that a cringing underling bite off two of his own fingers. Reacher must eventually confront the evil one himself, played by Herzog with a weird contact-lens to make one of his irises milky-white – as if he wasn't scary-looking enough as it is. Then the action kicks off in a scene so elaborately edited and choreographed, it looks like an adaptation of Matthew Bourne's famous all-male Swan Lake. Three against one, corrects Reacher coolly, because the last two guys always turn and run. Perhaps the most purely enjoyable scene comes when Reacher (trained in badass unarmed combat) is challenged to a fistfight by five bullies outside a bar. Reacher begins by telling Helen that he will help, if she agrees to interview the victims' families: an unthinkably tactless thing to do, but it elicits important details about the crime. The story pans out in a long, involved and more than faintly preposterous style, though with a few procedural diversions along the way. It is the defendant himself who mysteriously calls on Reacher's help – the only man who can prove his innocence. The investigating officer Emerson (David Oyelowo) is certain of his guilt, but to Emerson's astonishment and chagrin, a brilliant and beautiful lawyer, Helen (Pike), has stepped forward to defend this man, simply to spite her overbearing dad, the district attorney, played by Richard Jenkins. This Pimpernel of the US military re-emerges when a trained army sniper is arrested for the fatal shooting of five people, apparently at random. We get to glimpse his file, which is regarded with the same awestruck respect and fear as that of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Reacher is a wild card, a highly decorated warrior once employed as a brilliant internal investigator, who has now quit the army and disappeared off the map, living a mysterious and somewhat ascetic life. He wears leather bomber jackets and tan shoes, and in one scene a Persil-white top that is almost as low-cut as Pike's. Cruise gets one fairly cheeky shirtless scene – which McQuarrie ironises with a throwaway gag – and his chest dimensions have evidently expanded mightily, while his tummy is sort of contracted into a muscular scrunch, as if you'd removed the plastic holding together a six-pack of beer and tied it in a knot. He does, however, appear to be at eye-level with Rosamund Pike. So he remedies matters by bulking out east and west and walking with a shoulder-rolling, sub-Mitchum gait as if getting his arms past his pecs was a big problem. Tom Cruise is naturally Reacher, who in the book is a big guy. Watch the trailer for Jack Reacher Paramount It comes out this week in the US and on Boxing Day in the UK. But the film does show gun enthusiasts as, by and large, loathsome creeps, and that goes especially for people who drone on about their Second Amendment rights. It is watchable, though, of course, easily mocked: I discovered for myself recently that the joke about adding "-round" to the hero's surname is so prevalent online that it has almost caused Twitter to crash. Given its gun theme, the distributors might have pondered the possibility that this release should be postponed. When he read through the script, we can only imagine Herzog's subsequent, tearful phone call to his agent: "I thaBut Herzog's role is sadly pretty small in this outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller. At first glance, this looks hurtfully close to typecasting. Herzog just happens to be playing the sinister-looking, scary European guy with the heavy German accent. And now the legendary German director Werner Herzog appears in this movie, which stars Tom Cruise as hunky military investigator Jack Reacher, directed by Christopher McQuarrie and adapted by him from the bestseller One Shot by Lee Child. François Truffaut appeared in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Fritz Lang appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris. T here is a rich and varied tradition of great directors taking cameos in other people's films.
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