†After all the shitty posters, here’s our trailer for Jack Reacher in which the infamously diminutive Tom Cruise plays a famously hulking rogue investigator. I feel like it’s cut with about as much finesse as the posters were assembled with, and yet I still feel like there’s a cool movie underneath all the clunky cuts…

That last gag works for me and I won’t mind seeing Cruise in a less glitzy badass role, but this is definitely a case of “wait and see.” A brilliant choice like casting Werner Herzog as the villain goes a long long way, but this one could go in either direction.

I will say though, I’ve seen a lot of people perplexed, actively frustrated, or enthusiastically offering casting alternatives to Tom Cruise, pushing forward how many big dudes with chops could have handled this role. There’s a big fallacy beneath all of that speculation though, with people assuming that this project (or any other, for that matter) was somehow inevitable, and Tom Cruise simply took his seat on a train that was already leaving the station. The thing is, when the equation involves someone like Tom Cruise, chances are that motherfucker is somewhere in the conductor’s booth, pulling some levers, you know? I’m just saying that Cruise can’t really be said to have stolen this part from a worthy, big actor like your Idris Elbas or Dwayne Johnsons… he’s typically as responsible as anyone as making sure there was money and interest for there to be a part in the first place.

That being said, this movie would look a whole lot more interesting if Cruise was 6’5″ and weighed 250lbs.