For the week of May 7th, Paramount Home Media Entertainment is bringing Jack Reacher to Blu-ray. The film is actually an adaptation of Lee Child's novel One Shot, and fans took great exception with director Chris McQuarrie's decision to cast Tom Cruise as the 6'5", 250-lbs Reacher that Child describes in One Shot. However, as with Cruise's then-risky turn as Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, Cruise mostly overcomes his physical limitations for the part; his Reacher might not be as physically imposing as Child's, but he shares the same keen intellect, wry humor, and efficient brutality that the Reacher of the text has. I don't know if Jack Reacher marks the beginning of a new screen franchise - it has some pacing concerns and a rote third act - though the movie itself is an enjoyable diversion all the same.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review notes that "Jack Reacher's blend of quality story and precise technical construction are accentuated by a fantastic lead performance from Tom Cruise. Although not the ideal physical manifestation of Jack Reacher based on the character's written description, Cruise does find the inner Reacher wonderfully, playing the part cooly and effectively with a strikingly efficient outward capability and inward mental prowess. Cruise's verbal quips and quick, on-his-feet thinking manifest naturally, defining the character perhaps even more thoroughly than the fisticuffs and gunplay. Reacher is a different animal than Cruise's Ethan Hunt, not quite so physically gifted as the actor's hallmark multi-film character but certainly someone capable of holding his own in a fight. Reacher is less a superman and more a well-rounded individual, gifted with powers of deduction, insight, quick-thinking, and capable physical stamina."
The world of vintage releases gets a big boost from MGM/Fox Home Entertainment with its release of The Great Escape. The film, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, remains one of the great adventure sagas of all time. Using a real-life POW jailbreak from WWII as his inspiration, director John Sturges stages The Great Escape like a heist thriller; we spend the first act getting to know the large, diverse cast of characters (including Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson), then we follow their plans for a daring prison break, and finally, we watch them try to successfully execute their exodus. Part of the genius of this picture lies in how skillfully Sturges modulates his tone. The derring-do and excitement of the first two thirds evolve into hushed panic for the final hour, and Sturges deserves credit for letting The Great Escape get so dark without sacrificing any entertainment value.
Michael Reuben wrote that "The Great Escape may be the greatest war film ever made without a single battle. The Bridge on the River Kwai can boast at least one major explosion, but The Great Escape doesn't even have much in the way of gunfire. Yet somehow the sense of conflict—of lines drawn, weapons ready and the enemy engaged—infuses every frame of the film, from the opening sequence of Allied POWs arriving at a high-security camp to a final scene that I'll leave unspecified except to say that a baseball is involved. The film has been watched and rewatched, studied, analyzed, written about and taught for fifty years now, and it's still hard to explain why it continues to hold viewers so firmly in its grasp, despite an extended running time and lengthy scenes in which, from an objective point of view, not much seems to be happening."
Also hitting the HD format is Universal's Mama. Mama boasts the presence of horror impresario Guillermo Del Toro as its guiding force - besides producing the film, Del Toro recruited filmmaker Andy Muschietti to direct it - and it certainly feels reminiscent of Del Toro's primary creative obsessions. This chiller is a dark fairy tale of two sisters (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) raised by a loving-yet-demonic spirit intent on shielding the girls from the evils of the world; complications emerge when a de facto mother (Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain) enters the picture, and "Mama" takes violent steps to remove her. Of the features that make up Del Toro's producing oeuvre, Mama might lack the focus and pathos of Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage, but it's leagues better than 2010's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - Muschietti has a great eye for moody compositions, and Chastain is wonderful as a reluctant authority figure forced to become a hero.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown wrote that, "Mama is horror at its most unsettling and, unfortunately, at its most familiar. Based on director/co-writer Andrés Muschietti and producer/co-writer Barbara Muschietti's own four-minute Spanish-language short film of the same name, it reinvents and refines the genre for a time, then, all at once, follows the path forged by just about every other ghostly haunting genre pic before it. It's easy to see what drew Guillermo del Toro to the Muschietti siblings and their style, though, and the film isn't with its share of chills, thrills and eerie things that go bump in the night. Nor is it without a number of terrific performances, as Zero Dark Thirty's Jessica Chastain, Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and young Megan Charpentier and little Isabelle Nélisse are sometimes all that prevent Mama from plunging off a cliff."
Additionally, Upstream Color is arriving on Blu-ray this Tuesday. For those viewers familiar with filmmaker Shane Carruth's debut film, the time-bender Primer, Upstream Color should seem predictably disorienting. It's a love story, of sorts, between two lost souls (Amy Seimetz and Carruth) suffering from the residual effects of trauma that's equal parts identity theft and Cronenbergian body horror. Carruth uses the specifics concerning their experience for dramatic impact, but he's also interested in conveying a very visceral, immediate sense of memory and place. Much of Upstream Color plays out like the sci-fi thriller Terrence Malick never made; Carruth's images are that elliptical and beautiful.
Not to be outdone, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is streeting two vintage titles of its own this week: Viva Zapata and The Verdict. Viva Zapata comes from the mind of legendary director Elia Kazan; it's his retelling of the life - and death - of of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who led a rebellion against the dictatorship of president Porfirio Diaz. Working with a screenplay from The Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck, Kazan mines Zapata's exploits for a good deal of contemporary relevance, and he gets great performances from the likes of Anthony Quinn, Jean Peters, and Marlon Brando, who brings his trademark improvisatory flair to his work in the title role.
In its broad strokes, The Verdict is far less ambitious than Viva Zapata. It's a legal potboiler - the kind of tale that John Grisham specializes in -about Frank Galvin, a boozy, morally dubious lawyer (Paul Newman) who scores a shot at redemption when he takes on a controversial medical malpractice suit, and director Sidney Lumet parcels out the story's intrigues at as steady a pace as a good beach read. However, Lumet has two secret weapons: David Mamet's script, which is colorful and illusive and complex in ways that most pop legal dramas aren't, and Paul Newman, who gives the best performance of his life as Galvin. Newman has internalized this part so deeply that he single-handedly turns The Verdict into a character study; Galvin's decades-long battle with alcoholism becomes as exciting as his courtroom machinations.