Jack Reacher is back. And no one seems to know why. The first filmic installment of the adventures of the former military investigator created by novelist Lee Child rustled up a resounding “meh” at the box office in 2012, and I cannot imagine that anyone who saw it back then could recall a single detail about it today. Other than, perhaps, the fact that star and producer Tom Cruise bears little physical or psychological resemblance to the hulking, laconic man he is in the books. That’s not necessarily a problem, unless that is the most notable thing about a movie. It was.
If Jack Reacher was a forgettable episode of a bland TV show that you might just about tolerate if you were flipping around in the middle of an insomniac night, Never Go Back is the episode that would convince you the show was about to be cancelled, and rightfully so.
This time, Reacher stumbles onto what looks like a big crime within the U.S. Army itself, something to do with, maybe, decommissioned weapons from Afghanistan being sold on the black market. So he teams up with Major Susan Turner (the awesome Cobie Smulders, underutilized here), who now runs the military police investigation unit Reacher himself once headed, to look into it. But as she notes, black-market profits are small potatoes compared to the enormous sums of money to be made in legit government military contracts. So we end up with a story with surprisingly low stakes.
To make up for the non-existent stakes, Never Go Back throws in a 15-year-old girl, Samantha (Danika Yarosh), who may or may not be the daughter Jack Reacher never knew he had until yet another lazy movie decided threatening a pretty blonde was a good way to motivate a male protagonist: The bad guys will menace her until Reacher backs down.
Even the filmmakers don’t seem to know why they were bothering to bring back Reacher. Director Edward Zwick – re-teaming with Cruise for the first time since 2003’s The Last Samurai, which was not a creative high point – has abandoned the one small bit of cleverness of the first movie, which served as a preemptive response to those who questioned Cruise’s fit in the role.Jack Reacher made a virtue and a joke of the idea that a small man – as Cruise’s Reacher is – might use the size of big opponents against them in a hand-to-hand fight. There’s nothing like that here. There’s no shaking up of action-movie tropes. A tired plot might be redeemed by riveting action, but it’s all shockingly rote and tired here.
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