Movie Review: 'Jack Reacher: Never Go Back'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's another feature about a habituated creature named Jack Reacher.
He's a former crime investigator for the U.S. Army who is now an unfettered, unattached civilian, hitchhiking and otherwise traveling around the country and helping out people he finds who are in trouble and need his assistance.
He is, in short, a noble loner.
Tom Cruise ignores the subtitle's advice by returning as the title character in – and the producer of -- the sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, based on the 2013 book of the same name.
The original subtitle was Never Look Back, so the warning has eased up a bit: from not even looking to just not going.
Cruise also produced and starred in the 2012 murder mystery, Jack Reacher, based on the 2005 novel, One Shot, as the ex-military investigator and a veteran of the war in Iraq, dispensing justice – as he sees it, anyway -- as a one-man vigilante squad who has become a drifter, equal parts hero, superhero, and antihero, with his barely suppressed anger always close to bursting through his veneer of civility.
In the follow-up, set four years later, with Tom on Cruise control as Jack, he is accused of murder in a 16-year-old homicide, and must uncover the truth behind a government conspiracy to clear his name.
But first he must help clear the name of Major Susan Turner, played by Cobie Smulders, who has been accused of espionage and arrested.
In so doing, he encounters a teenage girl, played by Danika Yarosh, who may turn out to be the daughter he has never met.
So he's on the run as a fugitive from the law, looking into this potential secret from his past – you know, that place he should never go back to, so of course he must – that could significantly change his life.
The original was an arresting if occasionally confusing thriller, characterized by self-deprecatory humor and sometimes seeming like a genre sendup.
The sequel, on the other hand, is somewhat easier to follow and maintains its breathless pace from beginning to end.
Veteran director Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, The Siege, Blood Diamond, Defiance, Pawn Sacrifice), who collaborated with Cruise on The Last Samurai in 2003, works from a script he co-wrote with Marshall Herskovitz and Richard Wenk that's based on the best-selling book by Lee Child.
This is an action piece, to be sure, and there is perhaps a bit too much in the way of shoot-'em-up scenes, but producer Cruise and director Zwick manage to leave enough room for the two key actresses – Smulders and Yarosh – to turn in effective, showy, physically demanding, three-dimensional performances in support of actor Cruise's stoic, laconic protagonist.
So we'll come to the aid of 2-1/2 stars out of 4. The action thriller, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, does go back and reaches the same modest but acceptable level of watchability and emotional engagement as its predecessor. This sequel, that is, does indeed equal.
