Salon.com > Action movies http://www.salon.com Wed, 03 Jul 2013 01:14:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “The Lone Ranger”: Rip-roaring adventure meets dark political parable http://www.salon.com/2013/07/02/the_lone_ranger_rip_roaring_adventure_meets_dark_political_parable/ http://www.salon.com/2013/07/02/the_lone_ranger_rip_roaring_adventure_meets_dark_political_parable/#comments Tue, 02 Jul 2013 22:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13349700 If you’re looking for an old-fashioned, rip-roaring western adventure, with dashing heroes, dastardly villains and beautiful girls, where you know who the good guys and bad guys are and you’re not troubled by historical guilt or contradiction – well, Gore Verbinski’s re-engineering of “The Lone Ranger” is not that movie. Actually, let me take that back, or at least rephrase it: This mordant and ambitious work of pop-political craftsmanship both is and is not that movie. It delivers, for my money, the most exciting action sequence in any of this summer’s big spectacles (even counting the destruction of Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion in “Iron Man 3”), a delirious chase-and-fight number staged on board a moving train – set, of course, to the William Tell Overture – that’s equal parts stunt work, digital effects and cinematic derring-do. But it also never lets you forget that the Manifest Destiny that drove Anglo-American society across our continent was a thin veneer pasted across a series of genocidal crimes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/07/02/the_lone_ranger_rip_roaring_adventure_meets_dark_political_parable/feed/ 26 “The Heat”: Police misconduct as feminism http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/the_heat_police_misconduct_as_feminism/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/the_heat_police_misconduct_as_feminism/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13340140 Nothing quite says female empowerment like violating the civil rights of criminal suspects, am I right? Stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, harsh interrogation and enforcing the ludicrous laws of the drug war – such are the frontiers of feminism explored in “The Heat,” this weekend’s buddy comedy starring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as a zany pair of mismatched cops. I know, I know: I’m being a killjoy and deliberately missing the point of the raunchy new woman-centric romp from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig, with a screenplay by “Parks and Recreation” writer Katie Dippold.

Well, let’s talk about that, shall we? What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women? With “Bridesmaids,” I could more or less understand why many women I respected seized on the film’s release as a feminist moment, and really wanted it to be a hit. (I still didn’t think it was all that great; Leslye Headland’s much-maligned “Bachelorette” was meaner, smarter and funnier.) If Judd Apatow-style, hard-R, bodily-function comedy was where the money was in Hollywood, then the ladies should get to slice some of that cheese on their own terms, and opening up space for female writers, directors and producers to do their work with bigger budgets could only be a good thing.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/the_heat_police_misconduct_as_feminism/feed/ 53 “White House Down”: Destroying America in order to save it http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/white_house_down_destroying_america_in_order_to_save_it/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/white_house_down_destroying_america_in_order_to_save_it/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13339020 As gristly, undigested globs of American fear, American hope and semi-justified American paranoia go, “White House Down” is both highly entertaining and perfectly timed (in a way that can only be accidental). This ripping and ridiculous yarn from disaster-movie king Roland Emmerich (he of “Independence Day,” “2012,” etc.) is about a right-wing coup d’état staged against an African-American president who has vowed to take down the “military-industrial complex.” No, seriously! And he kind of says it like it’s a new idea! All in all, the movie is something like an MSNBC remake of “Die Hard” mixed with “Les Misérables” (minus the singing) mixed with a wishful-thinking version of Barack Obama in which he personally takes out Serbians and white supremacists with an RPG. Oh, and just a little bit of “Home Alone in the White House.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/white_house_down_destroying_america_in_order_to_save_it/feed/ 20 “World War Z”: The zombie apocalypse gets super-sized http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/world_war_z_the_zombie_apocalypse_gets_super_sized/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/world_war_z_the_zombie_apocalypse_gets_super_sized/#comments Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13330930 You’re a lot better off if you see “World War Z” while putting all the Hollywood news and gossip surrounding the film out of your mind. If you don’t think about its tormented production history, its multiple rewrites and reshoots, or a budget that purportedly reached close to $200 million, what you get from Marc Forster’s movie is an expertly paced action thriller in a familiar apocalyptic vein, on a near-epic global scale and featuring some truly breathtaking set pieces. Yes, it seems severely underexplained and oddly curtailed; indeed, after two hours it pretty much just stops, rather than reaching any satisfying denouement. But “World War Z” is a genuinely exciting thrill ride that only occasionally feels bloated or painfully dumb; and overall it’s a good enough summer popcorn flick that Paramount Pictures execs can go to sleep tonight without an entire bottle of Ambien.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/world_war_z_the_zombie_apocalypse_gets_super_sized/feed/ 23 “Man of Steel”: Truth, justice and the Nietzschean way http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/man_of_steel_truth_justice_and_the_nietzschean_way/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/man_of_steel_truth_justice_and_the_nietzschean_way/#comments Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13324688 If no movie like “Man of Steel” had ever been made before – an attempt to darken up a superhero legend with a little mythological depth, some cutting-edge cinematic skills and a whole bunch of action – then Zack Snyder’s brooding and seemingly endless 143-minute Superman reboot might feel like a breakthrough. (I guess the "Superman Returns" reboot from 2006 really didn't take.) To be fair, “Man of Steel” has an idea behind it and superior production design, which puts it ahead of a whole bunch of Hollywood movies. Superman aficionados will no doubt find it suitably canonical, with an extended prologue set on the dying planet of Krypton, even if Superman’s classic uniform is now made of that inevitable nylon-mesh athletic fiber that supposed to suggest contemporary coolness (if you’re 12 years old and really into LeBron James).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/man_of_steel_truth_justice_and_the_nietzschean_way/feed/ 153 “Star Trek Into Darkness”: Who made J.J. Abrams the sci-fi god? http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/star_trek_into_darkness_who_made_j_j_abrams_the_sci_fi_god/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/star_trek_into_darkness_who_made_j_j_abrams_the_sci_fi_god/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 18:31:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13298750 Apparently I missed the papal conclave. Not the one with Pope Francis and the Argentine torture scandals; I heard about that. I’m talking about the high-level secret meeting in the super-secret sub-orbital space fortress where J.J. Abrams was elected sole curator, conservator and monarch of three generations’ worth of nerdy pop culture history. Seriously, people, how does one guy end up in charge of both the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” reboots? Give me a break! Isn’t that kind of nuts and megalomaniacal and wrong and just too much of the same flavor of peppermint hazelnut chip ice cream from that one summer in Connecticut, when “Alligator Woman” was on the radio every single day? (We can discuss this another time, but if I could create a world in which Joss Whedon had taken on “Star Trek,” and given Abrams the freakin’ “Avengers,” I’d do it in a heartbeat.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/star_trek_into_darkness_who_made_j_j_abrams_the_sci_fi_god/feed/ 142 “Iron Man 3″ box office hit in China http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_box_office_hit_in_china/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_box_office_hit_in_china/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 18:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287868 Despite the minor controversy sparked by product placement in its made-for-China scenes, "Iron Man 3" garnered almost $21 million in the Chinese box office, topping the one-day sales record set by “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” in 2011.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Online reactions to the film have been largely positive, but bloggers appear united in their consternation of the deliberate product placement that sees new a character named Dr Wu (played by mainland Chinese actor Wang Xueqi) consume a [milk] carton of Gu Li Duo.

Not that audiences outside mainland China will get a glimpse of this, though: this scene is part of the film’s China release, a version which is four minutes longer than the normal cut seen everywhere else in the world.

"Transformers 4" is the next Hollywood studios film expected to follow the similar model of dual version releases.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_box_office_hit_in_china/feed/ 0 “Iron Man 3″: A playboy grows up http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 17:45:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287839 As far as bored and cynical, playing-out-the-string comic-book action sequels go – hey, “Iron Man 3” is a pretty good one! The third and purportedly last of Robert Downey Jr.’s adventures as the armor-clad but increasingly vulnerable Tony Stark features one of Downey’s most nuanced performances, arguably a lot better than the movie around him, and keeps him separated from the physical and emotional protection of the Iron Man suit for extended periods. There are several good supporting performances, not even including Gwyneth Paltrow’s abdominal muscles, which is really all I can remember about Pepper Potts: Guy Pearce, as a nerd genius spurned by Tony Stark years earlier who comes back for revenge; Ben Kingsley, most delicious of all, as a shadowy techno-Osama known as the Mandarin.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/iron_man_3_a_playboy_grows_up/feed/ 6 Michael Bay proud of “Armageddon,” after all http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/michael_bay_proud_of_armageddon_after_all/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/michael_bay_proud_of_armageddon_after_all/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:21:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280012 Yesterday, action movie director Michael Bay surprised the entertainment world when the generally unapologetic, pyrotechnic-loving director apologized for his 1998 blockbuster hit, "Armageddon."

He told the Herald: “I will apologize for 'Armageddon,' because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine."

But Bay, who is currently promoting his Miami crime drama "Pain & Gain," quickly squashed any (mis)interpretations of the quote. Taking to his online forum, Bay released said he is not apologizing for "Armageddon" at all, and is "proud of the movie":

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/michael_bay_proud_of_armageddon_after_all/feed/ 3 Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13275381 Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/feed/ 20 “Fists of Legend”: Ludicrous (and delicious) action extravaganza http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13267281 Not to indulge in cultural stereotypes about how Asian movies involve several different genres at once, along with a lot of ass-kicking – but that’s exactly what the overloaded and outrageous Korean martial-arts saga “Fists of Legend” is like. One of the mini-stories of global movie distribution in the last year has been the sudden emergence of Korean pop cinema in the American market, which is partly about the fact that the Asian-American audience is now spread across the continent and partly about the fact that Korean movies tend to draw so heavily on a blend of familiar Western and Eastern references, and aren’t likely to strike anyone as incomprehensible. Like the recent gangland thriller “New World,” “Fists of Legend” will open in numerous cities before moving rapidly to home video.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/feed/ 1 “The Place Beyond the Pines”: Almost a great American father-son fable http://www.salon.com/2013/03/27/the_place_beyond_the_pines_almost_a_great_american_father_son_fable/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/27/the_place_beyond_the_pines_almost_a_great_american_father_son_fable/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13252702 A sprawling, epic-scale triptych about fathers and sons in America that seeks to combine the spirits of Charles Dickens and Bruce Springsteen, “The Place Beyond the Pines” might be better off if it were just a crime movie with Ryan Gosling. Still, there’s no mistaking the immense ambition and tremendous craftsmanship of director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance (who made “Blue Valentine” with Gosling and Michelle Williams), and I think the movie is most effective if you know little about the story going in. So I’ll be pretty guarded in what I tell you about the story, which takes a couple of surprising narrative left turns and jumps forward in time.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/27/the_place_beyond_the_pines_almost_a_great_american_father_son_fable/feed/ 6 Pick of the week: A Korean mob thriller that could teach Hollywood a thing or two http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/pick_of_the_week_a_korean_mob_thriller_that_could_teach_hollywood_a_thing_or_two/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/pick_of_the_week_a_korean_mob_thriller_that_could_teach_hollywood_a_thing_or_two/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13248054 Ever since the Hong Kong action-movie boom of the 1980s, the film industries of East Asia have arguably been better at making old-fashioned, hard-boiled crime thrillers than Hollywood has. Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed,” after all, was a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs” (albeit an excellent remake with its own spirit and considerable subtlety). While Asian pop cinema remains just off the radar screen of mainstream American culture, it’s a whole lot easier to find than it used to be. This week, Korean writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s byzantine, slick and bloody mob drama “New World” opens theatrically in numerous North American cities, just a few weeks after its smash-hit premiere in Korea.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/pick_of_the_week_a_korean_mob_thriller_that_could_teach_hollywood_a_thing_or_two/feed/ 7 Who’s to blame for gun violence? Movie critics! http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/whos_to_blame_for_gun_violence_movie_critics/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/whos_to_blame_for_gun_violence_movie_critics/#comments Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13203925 At last the real villain has been revealed in our poisonous and circular culture of violence: It’s me. Well, OK, maybe not me personally, but the underpaid, disheveled and endangered tribe to which I semi-reluctantly belong, the movie critics. Even by an optimistic count, America is down to a few dozen professional film critics, most of whom traipse back and forth between screening rooms in Manhattan and Los Angeles, often appearing to have recently arisen at 7 o’clock in the evening. (The general fashion statement and social mode, as a friend once put it, is one of “Troll Under the Bridge.”) And yet, according to a baffling new article in Harper’s by cultural critic Thomas Frank, our sad-sack crew is a crucial enabler of American gun violence. (That’s a firewalled link, so I’ll try to quote liberally from the article while staying on the fair side of fair use.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/whos_to_blame_for_gun_violence_movie_critics/feed/ 97 “A Good Day to Die Hard”: Bruce Willis smirks the Russians to death http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/a_good_day_to_die_hard_bruce_willis_smirks_the_russians_to_death/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/a_good_day_to_die_hard_bruce_willis_smirks_the_russians_to_death/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13200547 So Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis – with 188 years of life on the planet between them — have all released new action-adventure movies within the last month (pairing themselves conspicuously with younger co-stars), and God help me, I sat through all three. Willis is the baby of the trio at 57, and it’s reasonable to expect that the bewildering and idiotic “A Good Day to Die Hard,” the latest installment of a franchise that has yet to fail at the box office, will prosper where “The Last Stand” and “Bullet to the Head” have bombed. It’s also the worst of the three films, by far, at least if you’re sticking somewhere in the vicinity of old-fashioned ideas about the coherence of plot, characterization and setting, but I recognize that's irrelevant. (For the record, Stallone’s “Bullet to the Head,” while totally cartoonish, is more fun and better made than the other two.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/a_good_day_to_die_hard_bruce_willis_smirks_the_russians_to_death/feed/ 18 Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sad-sack return http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/how_can_arnold_be_back_when_he_never_went_anywhere/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/how_can_arnold_be_back_when_he_never_went_anywhere/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:06:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13174379 So I just saw the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, “The Last Stand,” in which the 65-year-old one-time bodybuilding champ tries to stage yet another messy, jokey, meta-style comeback. This is a role very much in the mode of Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone – in fact, I kept thinking that Eastwood must have made this film, sometime around 1997 – with Schwarzenegger playing a small-town Arizona sheriff forced to go mano a mano, under exceptionally unlikely circumstances, with an escaped Mexican drug lord. It’s one of those mixed-up Hollywood pictures that has too much going on: It tries to protect the action-hero status of its visibly enfeebled star and it has Johnny Knoxville of “Jackass” in a moronic supporting role and the story doesn’t make any sense and it’s the American debut of whiz-kid Korean action filmmaker Kim Jee-woon (for you film-festival geeks, he made “I Saw the Devil” and “The Good, the Bad, the Weird”).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/17/how_can_arnold_be_back_when_he_never_went_anywhere/feed/ 25 “Gangster Squad” whitewashes the LAPD’s criminal past http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/gangster_squad_whitewashes_the_lapds_criminal_past/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/gangster_squad_whitewashes_the_lapds_criminal_past/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:28:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13167480 If you view Ruben Fleischer’s “Gangster Squad” as a violent period crime thriller in a familiar dress-up vein – as a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it’s reasonably successful entertainment. It’s got overacting from Sean Penn, beneath a ton of makeup, as legendary Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen, along with underacting from Ryan Gosling as the slightly nebbishy romantic lead and down-the-middle acting from Josh Brolin as its upright cop hero. Add in the digitally re-created, noir-flavored locations of postwar L.A. and the dazzling eye candy of Emma Stone in terrific period dresses and heartbreaking auburn hair and, hey – by the standards of midwinter Hollywood releases, not bad at all.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/gangster_squad_whitewashes_the_lapds_criminal_past/feed/ 27 “Baytown Outlaws”: A Tarantino wannabe takes on rednecks http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/baytown_outlaws_a_tarantino_wannabe_takes_on_rednecks/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/baytown_outlaws_a_tarantino_wannabe_takes_on_rednecks/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13166084 I’m tempted to tell you that, except for its thoroughly repellent racial and sexual politics, the imitation-Tarantino action flick called “The Baytown Outlaws” – which you could be watching on your TV or computer or mobile device right now, instead of “working” – isn’t much worse than “Django Unchained.” But that’s admittedly like saying that, except for that episode in Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth was one of the cooler Americans of the 19th century.

How’s that for sneaking two Oscar contenders into an article about a January VOD release that will never be nominated for any awards by anybody? In all seriousness, I’m not sure whether to recommend “The Baytown Outlaws” as a guns ‘n’ glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I’ll do both. A superficial and stylish redneck-sploitation spree, “Baytown Outlaws” has no real reason to exist beyond the quest for cash. Its appealing B-plus supporting cast, including Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and Andre Braugher, almost elevate it to the level of mainstream mediocrity – but then again, that was never the goal.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/baytown_outlaws_a_tarantino_wannabe_takes_on_rednecks/feed/ 2 Tarantino’s incoherent three-hour bloodbath http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13154752 Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers. “Django Unchained” feels like a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens, a slavery-revenge melodrama cum salt-‘n’-pepper action film that would be awesome if it actually existed. Like so many trailers, it’s packed with memorable scenes that don’t go anywhere, and keeps promising payoffs that remain theoretical. It’s got Western scenery on a grand scale and scenes of madcap comedy involving inept members of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s got veritable geysers and fountains and gushers of blood, an ocean of fake gore even by Tarantino’s standards. You could claim that he’s “quoting from Sam Peckinpah” with those slapsticky water balloons full of blood, except that that’s not quite it. It’s more like he’s quoting from crappy ‘70s drive-in movies that were quoting from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which was quoting from something else that was quoting from Peckinpah. (I may be missing an intermediate stage there, such as a cannibal film that was dubbed from Italian into Spanish and projected once, with the reels out of sequence, at a downtown Los Angeles theater in 1983.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/feed/ 58 “Jack Reacher”: Tom Cruise’s terrible timing http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/jack_reacher_tom_cruises_terrible_timing/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/jack_reacher_tom_cruises_terrible_timing/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:44:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148980 In the larger narrative of Tom Cruise’s late-career comeback, the new Paramount thriller “Jack Reacher” had a clear role to play – at least, before it became toxic, thanks to its accidental and superficial similarity to a real-life tragedy. It would be insulting to suggest that Cruise or Christopher McQuarrie, the film’s writer and director, are “victims” in any way, or that the commercial fate of a mainstream entertainment has any meaning in the face of the unbearable grief and tragedy of Sandy Hook. But it’s also useful to remember that Cruise and McQuarrie have done nothing wrong or unusual, beyond what people in Hollywood do all the time, which is to spin out violent and grotesque fantasies for our enjoyment. I think the problem “Jack Reacher” suddenly represents is more about us than about the movie. Confronted with our evident eagerness to consume simulated real-world horror as entertainment, we feel ashamed, at least temporarily.

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