Jack Reacher

Perfectly timed for a week in which everyone is like, "Hey, what's Tom Cruise up to?"—though actually timed for his 50th birthday, a day on which the Scientology cake must taste bittersweet—here's the trailer for Jack Reacher, the film that's hoping everyone will stop talking about all of that stuff and get back to talking about how silly it is that Tom Cruise is playing a rough-and-tumble, 6-foot-5, 250-pound drifter. Fortunately, the film doesn't appear to be going in for any forced-perspective shenanigans here, unless the actual movie features a scene of Cruise swatting that police helicopter out of the sky. And in fact, it addresses those criticisms directly, stacking Cruise up against some much bigger adversaries and still having him come out victorious in bare-knuckle brawls. True, Cruise's "drifter" also seems to be clad in soft, expensive leather and—rather than walking everywhere, like in Lee Child's books—he seems to do most of his "drifting" in a souped-up muscle car, making for a preview that owes more than a little of its borrowed cool to Drive. But the film promises that you'll forget about all of that and simply enjoy Cruise on his own merits, provided, as always, that you don't think about all those other things you've heard about Tom Cruise.