No Jack Reacher sequel? How else will Tom Cruise rescue this ridiculous film?

It might seem like Mission: Impossible but give Tom Cruise another 15 years and he might make Paramount its money back
tom cruise as jack reacher
Reacher man … Tom Cruise could bring out the hero's human side. Photograph: Karen Ballard/AP

It's a bad day to be a Jack Reacher fan. Admittedly every day is a bad day to be a Jack Reacher fan, filled with endless meek admissions that you're a Jack Reacher fan and half-hearted defences of Tom Cruise's peculiar casting as Jack Reacher – but today is a particularly bad day to be a Jack Reacher fan. You see, it has been reported that there may not ever be a Jack Reacher sequel.

  1. Jack Reacher
  2. Production year: 2012
  3. Countries: Rest of the world, USA
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 130 mins
  6. Directors: Christopher McQuarrie
  7. Cast: David Oyelowo, Jai Courtney, James Martin Kelly, Richard Jenkins, Robert Duvall, Rosamund Pike, Tom Cruise, Werner Herzog
  8. More on this film

This is mainly down to numbers. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Paramount bosses were expecting Jack Reacher to gross $250m globally. But because it wasn't able to hold its own in a crowded Christmas market, the film now faces the unenviable task of having to make $100m in China, Japan and Korea alone. That's unlikely to happen, so Paramount won't hit its target and that'll be the end of Jack Reacher.

Now, I'm fully aware that I might be the only person in the entire universe to hold this view, but I think killing Jack Reacher is a dreadful shame. It might not be the best film ever made, but it's one of the most unintentionally silly. What's more, it was designed to be the launchpad for an entire franchise. Surely it should be judged on that criteria.

The first film in a franchise is rarely the best. Tom Cruise knows this as well as anyone. Mission: Impossible, for example, wasn't very good. But you know what followed that? Mission: Impossible 2, which was also quite bad. But what followed that? Mission: Impossible 3, which was adequate. However, after that came Mission: Impossible 4, which was very good indeed. Perhaps Paramount should ignore the numbers now and play the long game. Who's to say that 15 years from now, after a succession of misfires and disasters, a 65-year-old Tom Cruise will make Jack Reacher 4 into an enjoyable film that finally manages to meet its studio's financial expectations? All it needs is a decade and a half of patience.

However, for that to happen, changes clearly have to be made to the formula. In Jack Reacher, the lead character wasn't nearly well-enough defined. Yes, he was an infallible superintelligent drifter, lusted after by every woman alive and able to defeat every single one of his enemies with one hand tied behind his back – kind of part Batman, part Bourne, part Littlest Hobo, part Robin Askwith from Confessions of a Window Cleaner – but this didn't really make him very accessible to audiences.

At no point in Jack Reacher did Tom Cruise do a single thing wrong. Someone had framed a man for murder, so he used his strength and intelligence to solve the case as efficiently as possible, and that was it. He didn't put a foot out of place for the duration of the entire film. He didn't even fall into the easy faux pas of asking Rosamund Pike what the hell her accent was supposed to be. Perhaps, if there's a sequel, we should see the human side to Jack Reacher. Maybe a scene of him being intimidated by the choice of coffees in Starbucks or casually trying to shake yesterday's rolled-up underpants from the leg of his trousers without anyone noticing. Anything, just to make him seem like a person.

Or maybe we could go the other way, and make Reacher into the superhero he clearly wants to be. Perhaps the entire film could be about him fist-fighting a billion soldiers while simultaneously reciting pi to 50,000 places, curing cancer, deflecting bullets with the sheer force of his charisma and winking at a bus full of giggling women who are all very obviously young enough to be his daughter. That'd be just as good.

But, whatever happens, there has to be a Jack Reacher sequel. Or several Jack Reacher sequels. A film as unintentionally stupid as this can't simply be orphaned.

Today's best video

Latest reviews