It’s been a rough summer for Tom Cruise, what with “Rock of Ages” bombing, his marriage collapsing, and his wife attempting to win sole custody of their six-year-old daughter. However, maybe Cruise will be able to earn a little bit of goodwill back from audiences with the trailer for his upcoming “Jack Reacher” (embedded above), which finds him playing the kind of badass action star he’s known for. Cruise’s title character is an ex-military investigator tracking down a killer. The movie is written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who previously wrote Cruise’s “Valkyrie” and helmed a recent Streaming Pick from our own James Frazier – 2000’s cult favorite “The Way of the Gun.” It co-stars Rosamund Pike and Robert Duvall.
“Jack Reacher” is set to rev up American theaters on December 21. It will have a lot of competition for holiday audiences–most notably Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” and Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit”–but our hunch from this trailer is that it will do pretty well.