As my first foray into the world of Jack Reacher, I wasn’t too impressed.

Though Tom Cruise played a convincingly moody, dark action hero, the added element of a possible love affair and a newly discovered daughter detracted from the attraction.

During the first glimpse we get of Reacher, he’s just finished righteously beating the stuffing out of some human traffickers and has their local sheriff accomplices arrested. It definitely seemed like a typical Cruise action movie: He finds bad guy, beats him to quivering jelly, and waltzes off into the sunset.

In this iteration, as per usual with Tom Cruise, he begins to develop a love interest with Major Susan Turner (played by Cobie Smulders), who took over his position working with the Military Police. After every beatdown scene, Cruise is pictured hitchhiking along the highway to the audio of his various conversations with Turner.

Reacher eventually makes his way to Washington, D.C. to meet her and is shocked to discover that she has been arrested for espionage. This sets off a series of events that lead to a major drug bust and a showdown in New Orleans.

With a mediocre plot and some interesting elements, the movie was decent. As to action, I found the movie lacking. With only a handful of serious fight scenes, the usual adrenaline rush present in Cruise’s films was absent. The movie focused more on the emotional side, which is true to its literary origin, but not what the movie-going audience expected.