Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (English)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Patrick Heusinger, Aldis Hodge, Danika Yarosh and Holt McCallany
Director: Edward Zwick
There are 20 Jack Reacher books. Let that sink in. One released every year since 1997 and two in 2010. Lee Child, like his former-military protagonist Jack Reacher, is a mean machine. It’s Hollywood’s favourite pastime to make big budget blockbusters out of books, even the mildly successful ones. Let’s see how Jack Reacher: Never Go Back fares based on this policy.
The second Jack Reacher film (adapted from Child’s 2013 novel of the same name) starts ominously enough with several men lying injured on the road. It turns out, Reacher – played by a middle-aged Tom Cruise – is to blame. It just sets the precedent for the film: suave, self-assured Reacher effortlessly (albeit with a few superficial wounds) saves the day.
Cruise, who’s no stranger to the action genre, looks like the years have caught up with him. Nonetheless, he efficiently does what Reacher is supposed to: fight a gang, fall off buildings still upright.
In Never Go Back , Reacher strikes up a bit of phone romance with his successor at the USAMPC (the Military Police Corps). But when our hero makes his way across the country to D.C. to see Major Susan Turner (played by a perpetually smouldering Cobie Smulders), she’s been dismissed from her rank on the charges of espionage. Like a knight in shining armour, Reacher meddles (despite her blatant refusal of his help) to save his potential love interest. In the meantime, he also comes to know of a paternity claim against him in the army. Reacher’s got a 15-year-old daughter, Sam (Danika Yarosh); the character is just plain annoying.
What starts out as a high-paced exciting film soon unravels in to a family drama. So while we’re watching Reacher and Turner run, there’s a teenager that needs to be rescued. Why? Well because, as his daughter, she automatically becomes a target.
The film’s plot line is supposed to be the uncovering of the secret behind Turner’s false incarceration, but Never Go Back focuses an undue amount of screen time on the budding father-daughter relationship. For her part, Smulders plays a convincingly tough army woman, commanding the respect her rank would in real life. Turner is just as agile as Reacher and even demands to be treated equally, which is perhaps the one redeeming factor.
And yet, Never Go Back falls short of being a cohesive effort: the action is never exciting enough, the characters are not three-dimensional and even the forced drama doesn’t elicit any empathy from the audience. Those end credits couldn’t have come fast enough.
DEBORAH CORNELIOUS