Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

Back in 2012, I really enjoyed Jack Reacher as a surprising find amid the end-of-year fare that December. It didn’t do much in the department of the new, but it excelled in the field of competency and cleverness. Four years later, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back takes a clear and safe path down the middle of the middling road, erring on the side of generic without ever living up to its own promise.

Journeyman Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) roams the country looking to right wrongs, but when he arrives in Washington, D.C., to liaise with Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), he discovers that the major has been imprisoned for espionage. Suspecting that a game is afoot, Reacher strikes out on his own to pursue the truth about Major Turner and about the young girl (Danika Yarosh) who may be his daughter.

Four years ago, it seemed fairly obvious that Jack Reacher was the launching point for a new film franchise – although it seemed very much of a piece with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible work, Jack Reacher was something of a scrappy American James Bond rather than the polished and unflappable Ethan Hunt. Equally good in a fight or a moment of deduction, there was much to like about Jack Reacher, even if the character wasn’t particularly distinctive in and of himself. But, as they say, he could have been a contender.

Instead, the sequel features Jack Reacher in a very generic plot, a half-hearted thriller in the espionage mystery subgenre, which doesn’t have much in common with the original film, nor does the protagonist actually drive the plot. Indeed, the film might better have been titled Jack Reacher: Ladies Night Out, because the three women – Smulders, Yarosh, and Madalyn Horcher, who plays a sergeant who assists Reacher – end up doing most of the heavy lifting as far as investigation and deduction go. (In fact, I suspect one might enjoy the film more if we think, as I tried to do, of Smulders as playing Maria Hill in a SHIELD-themed spinoff of The Winter Soldier. Henry Jackman’s score here certainly reminds one of such.)

When he’s in action mode, Jack Reacher is compelling enough, but it’s tough to hang a whole film on running/jumping/punching (just ask Pacific Rim), especially when it’s pretty much all that Reacher does of consequence in the film. And it’s a particular shame in this film when there’s an opening scene that introduces the character in pitch-perfect fashion – it’s the opener you’ve seen in trailers for months now, and it establishes the character in fairly succinct order. He’s a ferocious brawler with a sly sense of humor and a head for meticulous planning. Now that’s a character in charge of his own film, and a character who ought to enjoy a long and prosperous franchise.

We certainly get the former, plenty of action shots in which Tom Cruise punches someone so hard he leaves a bloodstain on the wall behind him. As action setpieces go, Never Go Back is probably worth going back, but it lacks the deductive ingenuity that made Jack Reacher such a surprise. Much of those investigative elements are given to other characters, leading one to wonder what Jack Reacher’s actually doing in this movie. Here, Reacher is reduced to following orders (something the character isn’t, I presume, known for doing) and roughing up ruffians who pursue him.

What he doesn’t do is command the screen in the way that he did four years ago. If we’re going to disregard the subtitle’s advice and come back for more in a third outing, let’s not give Reacher a sidekick or a love interest or even a commanding officer. Just turn him loose and let him do his thing. And let’s be smart about it, though “smart” is seldom the operating word in a sequel.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some bloody images, language and thematic elements.” Directed by Edward Zwick. Written by Richard Wenk, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz. Based on the novel by Lee Child. Starring Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, and Danika Yarosh.