Review Roundup (12/20): JACK REACHER

Tom Cruise is back on the big screen, and back in a big, action-packed way. The actor's latest blockbuster, JACK REACHER, is set to hit theaters tomorrow, Dec. 21.

JACK REACHER is based on Lee Child's best-selling novel "One Shot." The thriller also stars Rosamund Pike, David Oyelowo, Richard Jenkins, Alexia Fast, Robert Duvall, Jai Courtney and Werner Herzog and was directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a script by Josh Olson and McQuarrie.

Check out what the critics are saying below!

A.O. Scott, The New York Times: "And so 'Jack Reacher' lumbers through a series of beatings, shootings and bludgeonings on its way to a climactic, not terribly surprising showdown. There is a pretty good car chase and a lot of very bad dialogue. Mr. McQuarrie, on his second outing as a director (his screenplays include "The Usual Suspects" and "Valkyrie"), seems more suited to action scenes than to the ostensibly simpler task of filming people talking. Nearly every conversation is stilted and lame, laden with the kind of repartee that might strike you as witty if you had no sense of humor...The self-confident, supercompetent Reacher is a character Mr. Cruise could play in his sleep, which is pretty much what he does."

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: "This is Cruise's show. And he nails it. The patented smile is gone, replaced by a glower that makes Jack Reacher a dark and dazzling ride into a new kind of hell."

Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: "And here's the truth. The truth is, we cannot drain a moviegoing experience of its context. "Jack Reacher" is not an easy movie to enjoy at this particular moment. Not in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school killings and the 28 dead...But it's not easy to take "Jack Reacher" in the intended escapist spirit. Not with so many close-ups of so many bullets, and so many guns given their glinty moment in the sun."

Christy Lemire, The Associated Press: "Besides being a mind teaser, "Jack Reacher" offers the muscular thrills of a `70s action flick, including fight scenes that mercifully aren't over-edited messes and a thrilling, prolonged car chase through the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, with the grinding and screeching providing its own rhythmic soundtrack. Cruise dials down the megawatt charisma and instead relies on a no-nonsense world-weariness which has its own appeal. He also has a dryly funny give-and-take with Robert Duvall, his "Days of Thunder" co-star, as the gun range owner who becomes Reacher's ally."

Chuck Wilson, The Village Voice: "Logic is rarely the point in movies like this (and the novels that inspire them). There's much to enjoy here: a goofily funny hallway fight between Reacher and two thugs best described as "Dumb" and "Way Dumber"; the unlikely sight of revered film director Werner Herzog(Rescue Dawn; Cave of Forgotten Dreams) portraying an evil villain who chewed off his own fingers in a Soviet Gulag."

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: "Jack Reacher stumbles around looking for a unifying narrative tone, while the star soldiers on, offering up his generic action-hero stance of calm, opaque concentration."

Richard Corliss, Time: "Jack Reacher, the very ordinary new Tom Cruise thriller, may be a minor collateral victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage. Because it begins with this scene of a mass slaughter, shown from the gunman's point of view, the movie accidentally and automatically evokes obscene images of slain first-grade children. Those images will be in most Americans' minds for a while, certainly through the early run of the movie, which opens Friday. Popular entertainment, meant to relieve people of real-life cares by leading them into a fictional world, occasionally grazes against some national trauma. That is the case with Jack Reacher."

Peter DeBruge, Variety: "Whereas the hyperkinetic actor looks best on the run, Reacher is a slow-moving, six-and-a-half-foot enforcer -- the kind of guy Cruise should be outwitting, not playing."

The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Cruise might not be the 6-foot-5 rock described in the books, but he makes the title role fit him like a latex glove in a winning turn that could spawn a popular new franchise for the star, if public reaction to Christopher McQuarrie's film is as strong as its fun quotient warrants...At least in terms of his action-film portfolio, Cruise is in top form here; if he feels like working really hard as a star and producer."

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