Skip to main content

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review


I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence.


What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the same name, Never Go Back has Reacher returning to his old stomping grounds, the headquarters of the 110th Military Police, which he once commanded. It’s now under the command of Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders, from How I Met Your Mother and the Marvel Avengers movies). When Reacher comes to D.C. to visit with Turner, he discovers that she’s been arrested for treason.



What follows is Reacher’s personal crusade to clear the good name of Major Turner. But what also happens with the film is sort of fascinating in a “train-wreck” sort of way. There’s virtually no chemistry between Cruise and Smulders--nothing at all. Watching them do intimate scenes together is uneasy, because you’re basically watching a pair of actors lifelessly recite lines at each other. What makes this film even worse is a sub plot about how Reacher might have a teenage daughter that he didn’t know about--saddling the character with a whiny, bratty kid (Danika Yarosh) who is so grating that I wanted the bad guys to kill them all just to be done with it.


And speaking of the bad guys, they’re so bland that they’re pretty much nonexistent. The first Reacher film had Werner Herzog and Jai Courtney, who were both very memorable and so good in their parts that you cheered when Reacher got justice on them. In Never Go Back, one of the villains doesn’t even have a name, and his final fight with Reacher is so lazily directed it just provokes a big “meh”. The whole film in general really feels “off,” with many of the sets looking very much like sets, with the overall pacing lethargic and the suspense nonexistent. Instead of Never Go Back, this one should be called Never Watch Again--which is fine with me. I’ll stick to the Jack Reacher books from now on, thanks. --SF


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Holdovers -- a review

It’s always a joy to watch someone who’s a master at their work, whether it’s a musician, an artist, or an actor. Most great actors make it look easy--which is not to say that I think acting is an easy job. I know from personal experience that acting is very hard. It’s a skill that the talented make look very easy, and one of the most talented actors working today is Paul Giamatti. If you’ve watched some movies over the past few years, chances are very good that you’ve already seen Paul Giamatti. He was the jittery earthquake expert in San Andreas , the sympathetic police chief in The Illusionist , and as the titular John Adams (a part that got him the Emmy and a Golden Globe) in the 2008 HBO series of the same name. Recently, I saw Paul Giamatti in the superb The Holdovers , a movie that I wasn’t planning on writing up, but I kept thinking about it--and all of its characters--long after I saw it. In The Holdovers , Giamatti plays Paul H...
Post a Comment
Read more

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice -- a review

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...
Post a Comment
Read more