Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher has to be one of the biggest miscastings in history. After Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, perhaps... but that underlines that even the creator of the character can still be dreadfully wrong after the movie is made and released.
I only found out about this casting today but the thing that really incenses me is that I actually work in a bookshop and I hand-sell Jack Reacher to all the thriller readers we have coming in through the door. I don't know how I'll be able to look people in the eye as I do that from now on!
Ray Stevenson (played Titus Pullo in the TV series Rome), Gerard Butler (played Leonidas in the film of 300) and Viggo Mortenson (played Aragorn in The Lord Of The Rings) have all been names floated on the discussion boards I've been reading tonight and any one of them would make better choices as actors for Jack Reacher. Lee Child can say what he likes about metaphor but perhaps he should look at those moments when Reacher's size are plot points in his stories (see Reacher crawling through a miniscule tunnel in Die Trying). I've read all his Reacher novels and have never regarded Reacher's size as a metaphor.
If you want a franchise that lasts as long as James Bond (or Jason Voorhees, I suppose) you need to take the audience into account more than less. There are plenty of Reacher movies to be made, if you get the right actor to commit, and for my money Tom Cruise is not that man.
I did like the idea Cruise could play a victim in the opening sequence of the movie. That was cute...
