The film begins with a lone gunman, a sniper setting up for a kill in a parking garage facing a Pittsburg park. Barely a minute in, he calmly shoots five random people with just as many shots, then packs up and drives home. Except the perp is caught red-handed with damning evidence — an expended bullet round, a thumbprint on the coin he used for the parking meter. It's a matter of time before the due process of the law is applied and justice is served. But he calls out a name in desperation — that of Jack Reacher.

If you believe what you watched is the beginning of the film, it's easy to mistake Jack Reacher as a cookie-cutter police procedural, a detective thriller with prerequisite car chases, red herrings, conspiracy theories, starring a unique detective.

It's a tribute to director-writer Christopher McQuarrie's cinematic vision and storytelling that his film adaptation transcends its source material, lifting a potboiler action-thriller piece into a self-consciously modern Western, much like his previous directorial effort, The Way of the Gun. Jack Reacher, a former US military police major turned wandering drifter, vigilante and detective, is reconfigured into a modern gun-slinging anti-hero who is defined by his casual yet economical violence. McQuarrie transforms modern Pittsburgh into a Western town populated by corrupt big bosses, mercilessly authoritarian law-and-order figures, idealistic sheriffs, local goons for hire, and a larger-than-life villain (played here by septuagenarian director Werner Herzog) who marches to the beat of his own terrifying moral code — and drops Tom Cruise's Reacher right in the middle of it.

The result is a thriller that rises above pure action set-pieces, a mystery that is more than the sum of its red herrings. As a film, Jack Reacher looks and feels nothing like the novel it was based on, and instead resurrects the lyricism and morality of the Western.