The story begins when a man drives a van into the parking garage across the Allegheny River from a stadium and murders five people with a sniper rifle. Local cops pull a fingerprint from a quarter deposited in a parking meter near the garage where the killer set up and arrest ex-Army sniper James Barr (Joseph Sikora). Detective Calvin Emerson (David Oyelowo) and District Attorney Alex Rodin (Richard Jenkins) offer Barr a choice between confessing to the crimes and going to prison for life. Barr adds a third option: writing "Get Jack Reacher" on a notepad.
Reacher, who came to Pittsburgh after watching TV news coverage of the shootings, visits Barr in the hospital, where he's in a coma with memory loss after having been attacked by fellow inmates during incarceration. Reacher meets Barr's defense attorney, Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), who happens to be the D.A.'s daughter. The case has a few peculiar details, notably the fingerprinted quarter: what sort of mass murderer pays for parking? What really happened here?
Helen and Reacher (they call him Reacher, almost never Jack) discuss the incident and embark on their own investigation. Well, not exactly: Reacher drives the movie to such a degree that it makes Cruise seem insecure as a leading man (he's more generous in the "Mission: Impossible" movies). He does most of the talking here, trying out his own theories and picking apart Helen's. Mostly Helen is there to (1) help Reacher do things he doesn't have the clearance or access to do for himself, (2) be proved wrong or made to seem naive, and (3) get kidnapped and used as a hostage/leverage in the final stretch of the movie.
Reacher is a sharp and often sardonic investigator in the books and usually becomes the alpha in whatever room he's in. But there's something misguided in this film's tone. It tips things so that we spend two hours watching Reacher be right about (almost) everything. Helen isn't insulted or degraded by the movie, but she's not respected, either, and almost every person who dares step to Reacher gets his butt handed to him in a lunchpail. That gets dull after a while. If Cruise weren't so naturally intense and the filmmaking so assured, it would have gotten dull a lot faster.
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