Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

 Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Image via Paramount Pictures.

Never go back, the title to the sequel to 2012’s Jack Reacher advises. Never go forward would also be appropriate. The second film to bear its protagonist’s name adapts Lee Childs’ 18th Jack Reacher book for the screen. However, in the clear hopes of cementing a new action-thriller franchise for star Tom Cruise, the feature does little more than tread water. The eponymous, no-nonsense ex-military cop hero returns with another mystery to solve, another villain to pursue and another set of shady officials to flee from. It’s the rinse and repeat style of series-building. Indeed, those famous, advertising-inspired shampooing instructions would’ve also worked well in the movie’s moniker.

Episodic, procedural, case-of-the-week offerings have their place, of course – long-running novels and TV programs are built upon them. Alas, they often prove less convincing on film than on the page, and on the big rather than the small screens. The age of sequels, remakes, reboots and new chapters of decades-old properties making their way to cinemas with increasing frequency only highlights just how routine such by-the-numbers movies are; more regularly means less, but more often, and it doesn’t escape attention here. For Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, more means a lengthy rehash with a new female offsider, and with a predictable hint of family trouble an in attempt to complicate matters. 

Reacher (Cruise, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) is first seen talking his way out an arrest for assault, and simultaneously ensuring a corrupt cop gets his due in the process. Back in Washington, D.C. his successor, Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders, The Intervention), is grateful for his assistance; however when Reacher visits his former stomping ground and drops by to meet in person, he discovers that Turner has been detained for espionage. Certain of her innocence, he frees her from jail and starts tracking down the people responsible. His actions set a group of furtive hitmen on their trail – and also in pursuit of Samantha (Danika Yarosh, TV’s Heroes Reborn), a 15-year-old that a paternity suit claims is Reacher’s daughter. 

It’s the last element of the story that writer/director Edward Zwick (Love & Other Drugs) and fellow screenwriters Richard Wenk (The Magnificent Seven) and Marshall Herskovitz (Nashville) offer up as an ostensible point of difference, heightening the personal stakes and saddling roaming nomad Reacher with a reason to think about the consequences of his choices. Sadly, with the subplot as generic on the screen as it sounds in writing, and everything that surrounds it fitting the same description, the aimed-for emotional angle remains superficial. It doesn’t help that the film looks and feels the perfunctory part: blandly grim in its colouring; only the slightest big urgent in its pacing; and television-esque in its framing. As a character, Jack Reacher may champion a stripped-back and single-minded approach, but that doesn’t flatter the no-frills movie made in his image. 

Nor does it wring the best out of Cruise, who wears his usual look of determination as though he’s in cruise-control mode. In a film that tries to peek behind his protagonist’s workmanlike facade in an ever-so cursory manner, he offers little more than a slightly more furrowed brow and a momentary lapse in his rigid posture. That said, he does fare better than the bulk of his co-stars; though Smulders adds energy, she’s let down by the material, and Yarosh overplays her cynical teen hand. As for the spate of foes they’re fighting against – including Patrick Heusinger (Casual), Holt McCallany (Sully) and Robert Knepper (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2) – they’re each fittingly, dully nondescript, rather like the majority of the end product that is Jack Reacher: Never Go Back itself.

Rating: 2 ½ stars out of 5

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Director: Edward Zwick
China / USA, 2016, 118 mins

Release date: 20 October
Distributor: Paramount
Rated: M