Reacher is a former military policeman who has given up pretty much everything and travels with an ATM card, a travel-sized toothbrush and an expired passport. That’s it. In “Jack Reacher,” he’s tasked with investigating the case of a sniper who has taken out five innocent people in Pittsburgh, and uncover a larger, “Chinatown”-esque conspiracy while he’s at it.

But does Tom bring enough juice to warrant further adventures of the stoic Jack Reacher, or is this a franchise non-starter?

PRO: Tom Cruise Is Jack Reacher

Much like the uproar that surrounded Tom Cruise’s casting as the vampire Lestat in the adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire,” die hards of the book series were up in arms when Cruise was assigned the task of embodying Jack Reacher for the big screen. In the novels, Reacher is described as something of a brute – nearly 7-feet-all, with close-cropped blonde hair, well over 200 pounds. Cruise is, well, none of those things. But yet he still manages to totally pull off Reacher. Most of this has to do with Cruise’s wily intelligence, which aligns nicely with Reacher’s, who has a nearly Sherlockian sense of deduction. Reacher also has an unwavering sense of right or wrong, something that Cruise pulls off quite nicely, too. But more importantly, Cruise feels dangerous in this role, in a way that he hasn’t for quite some time. When Cruise is being threatened by a half-dozen local yahoos at the neighborhood bar and they are the ones that seem hopelessly outnumbered, it’s a testament to both the transitional power of the character (to be able to make that leap to the big screen so effortlessly) and Cruise’s acting prowess that, even though he is only a smidge taller than Danny DeVito, he can still scare the hell out of these guys and beat them half to death. Physicality be damned, Tom Cruise really is Jack Reacher.

CON: In Light of Recent Events, The Opening Scene Will Be Tough To Watch

I saw “Jack Reacher” a few days before the tragedy in Newtown, so that didn’t enter my thought process as I watched the movie. But talking to people who had seen the movie after the tragedy, it became very clear how upsetting the opening suspense set piece was – a sniper, looking through a high-powered sight, picking off innocent people as they went about their day. Particularly unsettling is the fact that he gets a small girl in his crosshairs (she ends up not being shot but you’re under the assumption that she was killed for at least the first part of the movie). This has already caused the movie’s premiere in Pittsburgh to be postponed and for a glitzy Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute to Cruise to be pushed back to an indefinite date.

PRO: It’s The Best Superhero Origin Movie Of The Year

About halfway through “Jack Reacher,” when Jack Reacher steals a classic American muscle car, that the character begins to take on a kind of emblematic, oversized power, not unlike your classic superhero. This is, after all, a man who doesn’t have anything and who is able to rise up and right the wrongs of a profoundly unjust and corrupt system, through following the clues and beating the hell out of people. We don’t know much about where Jack Reacher came from, or who he is (in the novels it still hasn’t been totally spelled out why he left the military and essentially became a drifter). So many superhero origin tales focus on the character as a young person through adulthood. We get Reacher when he’s smack dab in middle age. That’s really, really cool and all too rare. That’s some “Raiders of the Lost Ark” type stuff.