Back in 2012 actor Tom Cruise starred as Lee Child’s literary hero Jack Reacher in the film that went by the same name. The collaboration between Mr. Cruise and the film’s director/screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie would prove a fruitful one. The two have gone on to make Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Mission Impossible 6 (currently filming) together.
The original Jack Reacher film, to me, was at best an “ok” actioner that benefited enormously from the various stars littered about (Robert Duvall, Rosamund Pike, and, in a delicious villainous turn, director Werner Herzog) but, as I put it in my original review (you can read the whole thing here):
…the main problem with Jack Reacher and what keeps it from rising from being a good action film to being a truly great one is that there is never a point you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie. There is an artificiality to the product…
So a few years pass and in 2016 Tom Cruise returns to the role of Jack Reacher in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Gone is director/screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (I guess he was too busy with the last two MI films) and in his place is Edward Zwick, who collaborated previously with Mr. Cruise on 2003’s The Last Samurai.
What immediately, to my mind, distinguishes Jack Reacher from Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (JRNGB from now on) is that while the first film appeared to be well funded and the makers attempted to create an “A” level action film (though, again, I felt it didn’t succeed quite like it should have), JRNGB plays out like a far cheaper product, as if the producers slashed the budget considerably and, apart from the presence of Tom Cruise, the rest of the film plays out like any number of cheaper “B” movies out there.
JRNGB does not feature any very big star, in a cameo role or longer, other than Mr. Cruise and the action set pieces are relatively modest and never spectacular. Though I don’t mean to denigrate him, this movie falls more in the range of the many Jason Statham’s “B” movies versus the usual Tom Cruise ones. It says something that I could just as easily see Mr. Statham as this movie’s hero as I could Mr. Cruise.
As for the movie’s plot, Cobie Smulders plays Major Turner, a woman who now occupies the office and job that Jack Reacher held when he was a Major in the army. As with the first film, Reacher is essentially a hobo, wandering from town to town with very little money on him and helping out anyone in need.
He is curious to meet the person who replaced him in the army and heads to Washington to see her but, when he arrives, he finds she is imprisoned and charged with treason. Worse, Jack Reacher immediately smells a rat and realizes she’s being railroaded. The chances she’ll live long enough to see a trial are slim indeed.
While meeting up with Turner’s lawyer, Reacher is also told (in a bit of information which is plopped into this movie in a truly clumsy way) that he may have a teenage daughter named Samantha (Danika Yarosh) and that he’s viewed by the military as a deadbeat dad.
The two story lines intersect, of course, because the movie wants to make Turner a woman capable of taking care of herself and therefore the “damsel in distress” role goes to the teenage Samantha.
I will say this about JRNGB: The artificiality I felt in the first film is no longer there. But, again, this movie plays out like a low budget actioner, with our characters running from one place to the next and building up the information needed to arrest the big bad guy while staying one step ahead of his very deadly henchman.
Unfortunately, this is nothing we haven’t seen many, many times before and, now and again, done much better.
Despite this, the worst one can say about JRNGB is that it falls in the middle of the action/adventure film pack. Its a film you don’t hate as you watch it but, after you’re done, you realize there wasn’t all that much “there” there.
If you have absolutely nothing better to do and have a couple of hours to kill, you could do far worse than spend the time with JRNGB. Having said that, there are far better things you could do with that time as well.
Take that as you will.