Movie Review: Jack Reacher – Never Go Back

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back tempts fate with its somewhat sly, certainly ominous subtitle. Should Tom Cruise have taken his own film’s advice?

Have you heard the one about the stone-cold killer with a heart of gold?

How about the lonely wanderer whose steely exterior is softened by a surprise daughter?

Or the inspirational tale of a five-foot-seven actor who managed to secure the role of a six-foot-five man-mountain?

All three of these hallowed Hollywood tropes are threaded together in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, where star and producer Tom Cruise gets to play the title character from Lee Child’s beloved series of potboiler books, difference in physical dimensions be damned.

Sequels to 2012’s mildly successful Jack Reacher, like tomorrows, were promised to no one, and yet, here we are once again, with Cruise back as the retired army Major and current neck-stomper who loves telling people to wait for phone calls.

The original’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, has not returned, perhaps taking the subtitle to heart. In a sense, the first flick was McQuarrie’s audition for the big leagues. Now that he’s helming Mission: Impossible movies, the gig goes to Edward Zwick, formerly of The Last Samurai.

None of this explains why Tom Cruise is still hanging around. Who’s he auditioning for? Why hasn’t he palmed this off to Jeremy Renner already? Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is so far beneath him, it’s basically five-foot-five.

This time, Reacher puts a hold on his cross-country do-gooding to visit Washington and take his successor, Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), out on a date. Trouble is, she’s been arrested on suspicion of espionage. Soon, Reacher’s similarly wanted by military police, suspected of having killed Turner’s legal counsel. (Get the subtitle now?)

Smelling a conspiracy, the two of them go on the run – and run, frequently, they do. Have we considered that these Jack Reachers might just be an opportunity for Tom Cruise to conduct beep tests as training for Missions: Impossible?

It’s great to watch Cruise run, of course; his right-angled forelimbs swing hypnotically, like pendulums, except with the sharpness and speed of the T-1000’s arm-blades. Smulders keeps pace, both as a sprinter and spunky co-badass. Zwick and his fellow screenwriters Marshall Herskovitz and Richard Wenk attempt to divvy up the neck-breakings equally.

A third runaway joins their party: a teenage girl named Sam (Danika Yarosh). It’s a bit like replacing M:I’s Ving Rhames or Simon Pegg with Dana from Homeland. She’s thought to be Reacher’s daughter and winds up targeted by an unscrupulous, unnamed hitman (Patrick Heusinger). Suddenly, lone-wolf Reacher finds himself travelling America with a bickering family unit. No one is happy about the arrangement, the audience included.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back can’t boast its predecessor’s unique flourishes (bursts of ultraviolence; Werner Herzog as the villain; a stacked cast of supporting character actors) but it’s otherwise fine.

Sure, if this was made in the ‘90s (as it sometimes seems like it was) and starred Val Kilmer as the lead, you would not consider it acceptable content. (Ashley Judd would have owned the Smulders role.) It’s simply too unremarkable; its conspiratorial plot machinations too wan.

Thankfully, it has a movie star in the lead instead of current-day Kilmer. Cruise is endlessly watchable and his weird intensity is perfectly suited to the part. We’ll forgive the height discrepancy.

Though Zwick, long absent from mainstream filmmaking, is adept with the suitably brutal and bloody fight sequences, he struggles mightily with the tone, falling flat whenever striving for levity.

To break-up the solemnity and steeliness of our two military heroes, phrases that are not comic in any way are delivered in the cadence of jokes. The strangest might be when our leads hear a police report over the scanner that describes Major Turner’s age as 34, which is a totally normal, human age to be. Cruise wryly turns to her and says, “Really?” She responds, “Shut up.” Pause for laughter? Never mind the fifty-something Cruise was identified as being in his forties. It really is the ‘90s again.

The picture does produce one memorable quote, however. On the phone with his hunter, Reacher is accused of sounding nervous. He responds: “I’m going to break your arms. I’m going to break your legs. I’m going to break your neck. What you hear is excitement.” Now that’s good content.

3/5

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is now in cinemas. Rated M for violence.