I’ve just finished the book Reacher Said Nothing by Andy Martin. It’s an interesting book about the creation of the twentieth novel (Make Me). It’s worth a read if you’re interested in behind the scenes stories.
I’ve not read any of the Reacher novels as I’m not into airport genre fiction. They just don’t do anything for me. Someone said they’d get their hands on a book for me so I can give it a try but I doubt it will hold my attention.
I feel there’s a blog post to be made about the books despite my own lack of useful input. So, any opinions on the books you want to share? Favourites or hated books.
I watched the first movie for the second time. My review:
Jack Reacher (2013)
Nomadic ex-military policeman Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) becomes involved in investigating a mass killing by a sniper.
I don’t know if it’s the original book by Lee Child or if it’s this film’s writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, but there’s a strong sense of an intelligent person overseeing what is a rather nuts and bolts pulpy story. It has an authority to it that elevates it a notch or two above average, which is what this story is. I’m far more inclined to give the credit to the director over the author. This director didn’t make the shitty TV movie-like sequel Never Go Back (2016) which further suggests to me that the director and not the author is responsible for the taut effectiveness of this movie.
It’s a solid film with some strong moments (the sniper attack is a real grabber of an opening). The climax was too small scale to excite with only a few bad guys. German film director Werner Herzog, playing the main bad guy, cannot act. It’s a nuts and bolts efficient movie (despite being over two hours long) and it plays its spare simplicity as a strength rather than as a weakness. It’s an enjoyable movie, even if it does go through the rather generic motions without any particular flair.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25790862-reacher-said-nothing
I’ve been told by people in the know that the Jack Reacher movies are utter crap because the Jack Reacher in the book is taller than Tom Cruise, who apparently plays him in the film…..seriously.
The books are great if what you’re after is best read on planes, contains pretty graphic violence but very little actual sex and hums along like a TGV in deepest France.
The Tom Cruise films are not half bad if what you are after etc etc… but Cruise as the huge near-psychopathic juggernaut that is Jack Reacher is nothing else but laughable – although to be fair in his own wimpish way Tom does a decent enough job
Why do people find it necessary to take pulp fiction and movies therefrom so seriously?
It’s escapist nonsense you don’t need to engage your brain with and should only be treated as such.
I’ve never read a Reacher book and doubt I ever will, but the movies are, of their kind, pretty easy to watch and fairly forgettable afterwards. That suits me fine.
Week in the sun, want something to seep past the Sambuca as you toast? Week away with work, long evenings to fill? Buy a Reacher yarn. Can’t fail. Will only last until maybe late Tuesday evening, at best. Better take two. Give to charity shop or just leave behind. Buy another for the next trip. Envy Lee Child’s bankability.
Fillum equivalent? Ignore the short-arse thing, ignore the nagging Scientology worries, pretend it isn’t your Jack Reacher (who unlike Tom is effortlessly cool and a really great bloke), and go with the nonsense flow. Not as good as a Bond movie, or even a Mission episode, but a passable way to waste an hour and a half of your leisure time all the same.
Dead right. I like decent books – enjoy history, politics, heavy novels, biogs, music stuff…and occasionally a palate cleanser in the form of a bit of good old “biff the bad guys” Reacher or Tom Clancy. I’ve read most of the Reachers and I’ll read them all. Reacher is a classic anti hero, gets the right result, usually the wrong way, he screws up, makes mistakes, takes it on the chin, gets the girl (or used to – as he’s got older the bonk coefficient has dropped) biffs the bad guys and disappears into the sunset. What’s not to like?
As far as Tom Cruise is concerned the height thing is a bit daft but you have to ignore it, and he brought the right intensity and physicality to the role so he’s fine with me (and Lee Child, apparently).
I’ve read a couple of them and that’s more than enough.
The first Reacher book – The Killing Floor – rattles along but it has a very uneven tone. There is plenty of Dan Brown like exposition, a bit of behind closed doors sex, very little bad language but features some eye wateringly nasty violence. Can’t recall the name of the other one – but do remember that at the end Reacher gets shot point blank. But he survives because the bullet gets wedged in his heroically massive pecs.
The first film is pretty good and Werner Herzog has a blast as the thumb-tactic baddie. The second one, not so much.
As for the casting of Cruise, I do have a bit of sympathy for avid Reacher fans. After all, in the books Reacher is 6’5″ and weighs about 250 pounds…so Cruise isn’t the first person you think of. But he carries it off pretty well.
Yes! That’s the only book in the series I have read. I enjoyed it a lot but lo! the finale with the bullet/pecs interface did verily cause me to smite myself in the nut.
But based on the way the plot ticked along and the suspense was maintained I would gladly read another. I’m just not sure I’d part with cash to do so.
I love the Reacher books. I’ve read them all, incredibly consistent quality – the lesser books are still great reads. It’s the only series of it’s kind that I look out for, and while they may not be literary masterpieces that’s just fine for me, I’m not the cleverest person and find ‘literary’ books to be generally dull. If it says on the cover ‘Nominated for —- prize’ I can almost always safely ignore it – in fact if I raise my head to the shelf above me I can see ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara [shortlisted for the Man Booker prize 2015] I got about 170 pages in [out of 700+] and gave up. To my right is ‘A God in Ruins’ by Kate Atkinson [Costa novel award 2015 winner] I managed 96 pages out of 546 of that one. If you enjoyed either of those, well done. I’ll take Lee Child every time.
Those Kate Atkinson books are so tedious they could be used to slow an atomic clock; you did the right thing when you called it a day.
Not read the more recent ones, but I really like Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels. But if you are looking for a fast moving, action packed piece of pulp fiction, they do not fit the bill at all.
Chris Brookmyre might be my choice there, but there’s a lot more going on in his novels too than simply high tempo action.
The Jackson Brodie Novels are excellent – it’s my own fault really, I have history with Atkinson having failed with ‘Behind The Scenes at The Museum’, I really should know better
The Jackson Brodie set are great, and I adore Brookmyre.
Right now I’m going through Ann Cleeves at a fair old clip. I happened to find ‘Shetland’ on Netflix, and did my research. As a result, I’ve finished the Jimmy Perez set and am about halfway through the Vera Stanhope series.
Well plotted, to the point I would say “technically great” which isn’t something I often say about books. Good characterization – you can get inside the characters without 48 pages of exposition.
Not read any of the books, but I have some time for the first film. It’s basically a glorified TV movie, with three key features that make it entirely worthwhile:
(a) the opening sniper scope sequence is great;
(b) the fight in the small bathroom; and
(c) most importantly, the casting of Cruise and Herzog, the movie’s twin poles of colossal wrongness.
I have no idea why people complain about Cruise being in this – imagine how boring it would have been if they had actually cast some faceless 6’5 bruiser instead. We’d have missed out on the lovely duality of seeing a normal looking man with an extremely weird private life play off against a man who is publicly extraordinarily odd, to the point where you wonder if he can keep it going once he gets home.
I like to imagine Cruise, at the end of a hard day on set, taking off the leather jacket, driving home and flagellating himself with a special cosmic saucepan in front of a yowling mob of hooded figures (standard Tuesday evening), while Herzog exhales, puts on his driving slippers and heads off to his regular bridge night.
Also: the Herzog “fingers” speech is worth the price of entry alone. And it’s all made even better by the fact that he was largely excluded from press for the movie.
Love it.
In this era when having “a special set of skills” means action heroes being ninjas and marksmen and stunt drivers and a whizz with computers, I liked the bit where Tom/Jack was sh*t at driving a car.
Also:
“Could you please put on a shirt?”
“This is my shirt!”
I don’t understand watching a movie and linking that to the actor’s private life. He’s an actor. He has a life offscreen. The duality you speak of is irrelevant if the movie is doing it’s job of taking you out of yourself for a while.
LEAVE! THE CRUISER! ALONE! LEAVEHIMALONE!
Tom was great in War of the Worlds, and the Mission Impossible films, and the Jack Reacher films !! He’s an absolute star and if they ever remake Tremors, probably the best popcorn movie ever made, then i want him in that…as Kevin Bacon, not the old bloke.
They ARE remaking Tremors
http://deadline.com/2017/06/kevin-bacon-tremors-reboot-pilot-order-syfy-blumhouse-1202120429/
Glad to see some love for it here. It’s a total blast, just a brilliant brilliant B-movie (and I mean that in the best possible sense).
Tremors is wonderful. Just a perfect, massively likeable romp from start to finish.
Do what I did – buy the boxed set! All three in a slipcase for the price of a craft beer.
Who cares if the first one towers over the others, you’ve got them in reserve for that very wet winter Sunday afternoon when there’s nothing but endless bloody snooker or dramatised Kate Atkinson on the idiot box and you’ve watched everything worth seeing from iPlayer.
Result!
Nobody can replace Kevin Bacon in anything Tremors related. It is the law.
I’ve read a lot of them, though obviously I can’t remember which ones I haven’t read. (The publishers are currently running a promotion where you have to vote for your favourite Reacher book. Tough ask.) They’re terrific airport reads, and there’s no need for anybody to turn their noses up at that.
I was once reading a book proof of a new one (supplied by my chum at the publisher) on a flight to Singapore. The guy next to me was really excited, so I told him that if I’d finished it by Singapore he could have it. When we landed I still had 50 pages to go. He was disappoint.
True story: I was once at a publishing party and spotted Lee Child – not hard, he’s considerably taller than Tom Cruise. Drink had been taken, and I lurched up to him and said something along the lines of, Your sort of books aren’t normally my thing, but I think yours are terrific. He narrowed his eyes and walked away without a word. An awful warning to the book snob (or in this case, book knob) – I still cringe with embarrassment whenever I think of it. Like now.
*edit* By the way, LOUD, it seems a bit eccentric to read a book about the writing of a book by someone whose books you’ve never read. I can testify that someone who has limited patience for this sort of thing can like the Reacher books. Please report back when you’ve read one!
Exactly. I like eccentric books.* A book about writing a book is more interesting than the actual book (I might get Make Me out of the library while apologising to the librarian for being so clichéd in my choice of reading matter).
Someone on the old website compared me to that character in Metropolitan (1990) who said he preferred reading the critics etc. over the actual books. I did not disagree with that brutal character assassination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_(1990_film)
* My favourite book of the year so far, for example, is Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny. Proper litertature without the pretentious crap.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26198476-standard-deviation
My review of Standard Deviation:
“When I read her short story collection (Single, Carefree, Mellow) I wrote in my review that I connected to her. She was on my wavelength and wrote subject matter and prose that I liked, appreciated and understood. Her work just clicked with me completely in a very satisfying way. As soon as I was offered her debut novel I jumped at it without having to waste my time reading the blurb.
It’s a great book. Again I feel that direct connection to the author. I get what’s she’s doing. I will be very surprised if I read a better book this year. I feel very confident in saying this will probably be my book of the year.
There’s no story. It’s just a meander through the lives of an interesting, well-realised couple over the period of maybe a year or two. This was fine. Plot was not needed. Her characters, humour and prose were more than enough – and I say this as someone who doesn’t get excited about good prose as proper content trumps fancy metaphors every single time. This combines proper literary content with good writing. Her writing is quick paced without unnecessary descriptions. Her style is almost minimalist without becoming too spare.
I loved this book. I have no complaints to make about it. If someone was to ask me what my model definition of an ideal book is, I would point them to this. This contains the perfect example of what I consider to be good literature.”
I’ve read them all. Childs is like Bernard Cornwell – you know what you’re getting, and if you like, you’ll thoroughly enjoy the experience.
The movies I can take or leave. I just found Sharpe on-line, and had a rollicking good time watching Sean Bean when he didn’t have to die whenever he was on screen.
I love the Reacher books. The films are OK but they should come with an inspired by the books – the business about Reacher’s height and build, the size of him is a massive part of the character. It’s actually am integral part of his behaviour. The character is almost fearless, in part because he’s made that way, he’s a tank.
I read everything and anything, and where pulpy action thrillers are concerned the best of the books work because they’re almost pure plot. What they remind me of is something like Robert E Howard’s Conan. Reacher is basically a weapon and his movement through a situation is basically what drives the story. In my head he looks like a muscle bound Clint Eastwood by the way. And that’s the other reference point, Eastwood’s Westerns.
And yes I probably think about these things too much, but Lee Child at his best is as good a writer as anyone else. Context innit.
I like the Reacher books, and I hardly read at all. They rock along and I like the whole loner with no luggage thing. I’ve seen both the films and have to put aside my dislike of TC to enjoy them.
I have read the first half dozen books or so and enjoyed them a lot. I always read books in order of publication, though in the case of the Jack Reacher novels it doesn’t really matter at all.
Inspired by this thread I picked up the dvd of the first Reacher film for £0.75 at my local chazza. Might give it a watch tonight. I had been put off by the Tom Cruise casting too.
Good move. It’s a ton better than watching the fucking darts.
FYI
I’m plodding through Without Fail (2002, book 6). It’s the one about Reacher trying to protect the Vice President from assassination. I’m up to page 232. I’m putting it aside to return to it later because a more interesting book has turned up (George Luca: A Life by Brian Jay Jones).
Without Fail is readable but it’s also a pretty beige book that seriously fails to quicken my pulse. I can tell he’s dutifully hitting his word count despite a lack of inspiration. Many scenes and moments should have been given the chop. The words ‘okay’ and ‘average’ sum it up. It’s all a bit basic and uninspired. There’s nothing better than average to be found here. No original thoughts got within spitting distance of this author. It’s a very plodding reading experience that feels like it’s laboriously going through the motions. It’s not a colourful piece of writing or a particularly fun story.
I was in the library and I looked at the Reacher section (six books in stock). I opened one of them to find it was a new book. Already it had six loans stamped in it from the beginning of July 2017. Popular books, no doubt about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Fail
I’ve still not returned to Without Fail. I’ve now read about six or more other books and it’s way, way down my to do list. I haven’t given up on it but frankly it’s going to be months before I pick it up again. That does not indicate I was thrilled by its hacky charms.
I’ve still not returned to Without Fail. It’s still on my shelf but it’s now like 20 books down the list. I haven’t 100% given up on it but clearly I’m never going to finish it.