Jack Reacher is the kind of movie I rarely encounter these days: a tight, comprehensible action/detective thriller with both a heart and a brain, as well as some unexpectedly snappy dialogue that occasionally rivals the great exchanges of a classic 1940s noir. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a former military policeman who now exists as a vagabond, roaming from place to place in search of an understanding of what it is he spent his former life defending (i.e., he’s looking for America, as they used to say), and although he doesn’t invite trouble, it tends to find him anyway in the form of crimes to be solved and innocents to be protected. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this film is yet another variation on the theme that defined so many of the 1970s and ’80s television series I’ve always loved, a dude wandering around helping people, and I thoroughly enjoyed it every frame of it.

In large part, that’s because I was given the opportunity to actually see every frame. Jack Reacher eschews the hated shaky-cam cinematography and Cuisinart school of editing that has ruined other recent action films for me in favor of a more old-fashioned look. Fight scenes make sense, action is sequential and easy to follow (although no less visceral or brutal), and a car-chase scene between Reacher in a vintage Chevy muscle car and some Russian-mobster baddies in an Audi R8 is pure adrenaline-soaked pleasure, with no apparent CGI or editorial trickery, just two actual cars battling it out on real streets.

The movie is adapted from the ninth book in a series of novels by the author Lee Child. In an echo of the controversy when Cruise landed the role of Anne Rice’s Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, many of Child’s fans have been grumbling about his casting — the literary Reacher is apparently a very different physical type — but I thought Tommy-boy inhabited the character well. In fact, this is the most I’ve enjoyed his work in a very long time. The slightly creepy blankness he’s displayed in most of his recent films is absent here, and I was reminded of the talented, charismatic movie star I used to think he was before he became the Church of Scientology’s couch-jumping poster child.

Honestly, I’d love to see him play this character again. I never really got into the Mission: Impossible series, but I wouldn’t mind Jack Reacher becoming an ongoing franchise…