Here we have the building blocks for an action franchise. A hyper-competent and ultra-violent protagonist, already popularized in a series of books by Lee Child. A clean-cut charismatic movie star to play him, and to set a high floor for box office totals. A script sprinkled with sadistic one-liners amidst beatdowns, car chases, and a pervading sense of organized mayhem.
With Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the sequel to 2012’s Jack Reacher, Tom Cruise and company gamely try to give audiences the next Jason Bourne or Ethan Hunt, despite the fact that it’s not entirely clear audiences are clamoring for yet another franchise revolving around a flinty-eyed man with a wholesome Anglo-American name and military training in the craft of breaking bones.
That’s damning enough, but the first film in what will hopefully be a short-lived series at least delivered competent thrills, a characteristically gung-ho Cruise, and an idiosyncratic heel turn from Werner Herzog, the legendary director having a blast slumming it as Jack Reacher‘s campy villain. Taken on those terms, Never Go Back doesn’t reach the bar set by its predecessor, or even by the genre it inhabits. It’s sub-Jean-Claude Van Damme, never mind Jason Bourne.
Cruise is back as Reacher, an ex-major in the U.S. Army Military Police who moonlights as a do-gooder criminal investigator when he’s not walking alone down dusty roads or brooding in seedy motels. (The film waves half-heartedly at a discussion of the difficulty military veterans face in adapting to civilian life, but let’s not kid ourselves about the aims of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back). Reacher is written as a humorless brawler, and Cruise is forced to dim his eager-to-please movie star charm in service of the character’s perpetual scowl, which remains unchanged whether he’s eating scrambled eggs at the lonesome diners he frequents, or administering the discipline of his closed fist to a squad of goons. It’s unlikely that anything less than heavy-duty horse tranquilizers could truly lower Cruise’s energy, but his manic intensity is put to waste here.
When Reacher pays a personal visit to see Maj. Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders, deserving of her own action franchise) he finds that his sometimes-boss and potential flame has been arrested and wrongfully charged with espionage. A jailbreak is in order, and soon both Reacher and Turner find themselves on the run, fugitives embroiled in a conspiracy that only they can unravel. A wisecracking teenager (Danika Yarosh, acceptable) is also introduced to create some sunlight in Reacher’s gloomy facade.
Never Go Back is sorely lacking a memorable antagonist, Herzog’s cartoonishly fun bad guy from the first film replaced by a sociopathic popsicle stick mercenary with a buzz cut, and the script (by Richard Wenk, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz) is both incomprehensible and maddeningly predictable.
Zwick, the director of The Last Samurai and I Am Sam who here takes over the Reacher reins from Christopher McQuarrie, does not elevate the proceedings. By design, this is action-movie-by-the-numbers, which makes it all the more disappointing that it is devoid of any memorable action scenes. While Cruise is given plenty of opportunities to add to his highlight reel of full-speed sprints, the fistfights and gunplay here wouldn’t be out of place in a straight-to-video Steven Seagal release.
A climactic footchase through a Halloween parade in New Orleans offers up the potential for some visual panache, but the movie’s momentum, which peaks sometime during the opening credits, is long gone by that point.
There’s no reason for Cruise, or for audiences who guiltily enjoyed the first movie, to go back to Jack Reacher.
