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
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