Tom Cruise Stands Tall In First ‘Jack Reacher’ Image

The first official image of Tom Cruise in character as 'Jack Reacher' has debuted and while it doesn’t address the burning concerns of rabid Reacher fans who claim Cruise is too short to play their beloved anti-hero, it does give us plenty of ammunition for further arguments while we wait for the film to reach us in December.

For those unfamiliar with the picture, ‘Reacher’ is an adaptation of Lee Child’s best-selling novel 'One Shot,' which is centered around Reacher, an ex-military investigator who’s currently down on his luck. Reacher rebounds by digging into an unusual case involving a sniper targeting innocent victims during a bizarre shooting spree.

Paramount bought the rights to Child’s source material, and envisions this film as the start of a trilogy (the author has several Reacher books, which are begging to be adapted to the silver screen). But fans, from the get go, complained that Cruise wasn’t physically structured to play Reacher, who is described in the books as being a barrel-chested, muscle-bound giant of a man.

Like we said, that image above isn’t going to change fans’ minds. Reacher looks like Tom Cruise. At least director Christopher McQuarrie seems to understand the wandering spirit of the character.

He is free from any sort of anxiety. He is truly not encumbered by all the bulls–t that makes up our daily lives,” McQuarrie tells the magazine. “He literally and figuratively has no baggage. … He is an extremely pragmatic, matter-of-fact person. He’s very solitary, but he can’t walk away from a situation that needs to be made right. His own sense of right and wrong tie into that situation and he can’t leave until it’s been resolved. That’s his Achilles heel.

And as Entertainment Weeky points out, Cruise tackled the physical imbalance head on during a video presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

For those of you who know the books, I’m obviously not 6-foot-5, like Jack Reacher...but Lee felt that I was the right guy to drive fast cars and kick the s–t out of people onscreen.

We’ll see soon enough if he’s right. ‘One Shot’ reaches theaters on Dec. 21.