The sequel to one of Hollywood’s most underrated action entries of the decade wastes a solid performance from Tom Cruise.
Jack Reacher is a figure of almost zen-like calm—or he would be, if he ever stopped breaking people’s limbs so cavalierly. As played by Tom Cruise, the ex-military cop is somehow short and gigantic all at once, an oblong hulk who hitchhikes from town to town dispensing justice. The first entry in the Jack Reacher film series—based on a series of books by Lee Child—was a brutish delight, a grim potboiler that seemed conjured from an earlier era of Hollywood. But its new sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, is dispiritingly formulaic, retaining much of the first film’s swaggering masculinity, but none of its self-awareness.
It’s too bad, because the Jack Reacher series has given Cruise a perfect avatar for this late, strange, action-hero era in his career. Devoid of the boyish charm that propelled the actor to stardom in the ’80s and ’90s, Reacher is a vengeful alien walking among foolish mortals, a detached, but nonetheless oddly compelling ex-soldier who barks lines like, “I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot.” Cruise is terrific in Never Go Back, seeming more comfortable than ever as a man who struggles to personally relate to anyone unless he’s trying to snap their neck, but the film doesn’t come close to matching his bizarre intensity.
Directed by Edward Zwick (who worked with Cruise on The Last Samurai and is slumming from his usual prestige-picture territory), Never Go Back is adapted from the 18th book in Child’s never-ending series, and this choice of source material has its flaws. The film assumes an easy familiarity with its character that many viewers may not have, as Reacher navigates the world of the U.S. Military Police, of which he is a former member, and uncovers a gun-running conspiracy.
In 2012, Jack Reacher was a moderate hit that stood out for its weird flourishes, like casting Werner Herzog as the chief villain. The movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, gave its action sequences a unique visual snap—its opening, shown entirely through the lens of a sniper rifle, is one of the most bravura pieces of Hollywood action filmmaking in the last decade. McQuarrie then re-united with Cruise for the fifth Mission Impossible entry, Rogue Nation, where the two played with more elaborate set-pieces. Zwick, as a replacement, lacks McQuarrie’s panache. The fights are mostly blurry and dark, and the final showdown, which takes place on the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, resorts to every possible cliché rather than using that chaotic environment to its advantage.
Reacher is introduced with the same hushed reverence as in the previous film. Threatened with arrest by a local sheriff after getting into a fight at a diner, Reacher intones that soon the sheriff will be the one in handcuffs, pointing to a near payphone. It immediately rings with the news: Reacher is right, and the sheriff is going to jail, suddenly exposed as a human trafficker. This is the kind of magician Reacher is; he’s like a grim version of the Fonz, down to his propensity for leather jackets. When he walks into a room, people say, “We’ve been waiting for you to arrive.” When he wants to threaten someone inside a car, he punches through the window with ease, sustaining only a grazed knuckle in the process.
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