Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

The shackled Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) has this corrupt Oklahoma sheriff and his deputy right where he wants them in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the second installment of what’s probably going to be a long-running action franchise.
The shackled Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) has this corrupt Oklahoma sheriff and his deputy right where he wants them in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the second installment of what’s probably going to be a long-running action franchise.

Do you realize that Tom Cruise has now been a movie star longer than many of us have been alive? Since 1983, sliding on a living room floor in his underwear in Risky Business, Cruise has dutifully made on average more than one film every year since (allowing for an unusually long break making Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which famously was a grueling 400-day shoot). In that time, he has gone from kitschy teen comedies (Business, Losin' It), to wildly earnest dramas (Born on the Fourth of July), to a brief auteur period where he made films with Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson back in '99 (Magnolia). Since then, though, he has seemingly settled into the life of an A-List action star, playing a host of unstoppable secret agents and unstoppable sci-fi heroes, with brief excursions as a samurai, a smarmy movie producer, and an aging metal singer.

Being a star for that long, and that prolifically, working primarily in one genre, you can imagine how rote everything would eventually become. How many movies has Cruise sprinted down a street (actually almost all of them)? How many times has he smooched his co-star in meaningful close-up? How many cheerful smiles has he utilized in the closing shot of films, when the danger is over and everything has been happily resolved? Like a factory worker stamping cans, or a seamstress sewing a single pocket onto a pair of cargo shorts, you can imagine the repetition of Cruise's main body of work would finally drive him a little batty. Year after year: same stunts, different clothes.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

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Cast: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Aldis Hodge, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger, Holt McCallany, Robert Knepper

Director: Edward Zwick

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of violence and action, some bloody images, language and thematic elements

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

This much is certain: His latest film will certainly not set him free. In fact, there's a decent chance that literally everything he does in Jack Reacher, he has already done before on camera. There's the beatdown-of-multiple adversaries bit; the "Two things are going to happen in the next 90 seconds" thing; the going on the lam using false IDs piece; the obligatory sprint; the final pitched battle against an arch-nemesis, etc. Not only is this a film that will seem exceedingly familiar to almost anyone who has watched a movie in the last 20 years, most audience members could call out every plot beat by the time Cruise first comes into frame.

Reacher, a pretty tired character in his own right, seems to live as an avenging hobo, a vagabond with deadly skills, literally hitchhiking from town to town, quickly identifying whatever villain lurks there, neutralizing them, and heading back down the road like Bill Bixby, sans the tan windbreaker. When we first see him, he's drinking a cup of coffee at the counter of a diner somewhere in Oklahoma, the beaten down lowlifes of his latest crusade already writhing in pain on the gravel outside, an adventure already concluded, except for the closing quips.

Fortunately, there is but a brief lull, as Reacher puts a call in to the fetching Maj. Turner (Cobie Smulders), thanking her for her help on his last caper, only to find she has been arrested and thrown in a military prison for suspected espionage, an accusation Reacher doesn't believe for a second. Several minutes of screen time later, having sprung her from her cell, he and the major are sprinting across the National Mall, with high-level mercenary assassins led by an arrogant operative known only as The Hunter (Patrick Heusinger), in hot pursuit.

A flabby story eventually emerges that pits fugitives Reacher and Turner against a nefarious military contractor, running a crooked game and killing everyone in his path. As if that were not enough for Reacher, there's also the matter of Samantha (Danika Yarosh), a 15-year-old girl living in foster care in Washington who he is told may or may not be his daughter (the possibility comes as news to him), who becomes a target when The Hunter makes the possible connection between the two. This eventually leads to one of the more spirited exchanges of the entire film as Reacher and The Hunter make confident predictions to each other as to the amount of pain they will be inflicting

With Samantha joining Reacher and Turner on the run, the trio form a kind of misanthropic nuclear family, with the would-be parents suddenly having to deal with moody teen histrionics, biting sarcasm ("You're very intense," Samantha sneers at Reacher during one encounter, which leaves him stunned -- never underestimate the power of a child's derision, Jack), and child care issues (a fight ensues between Turner and Reacher when they both want to leave their hotel in order to hunt for a potential witness, though one of them has to stay behind for the kid). The cynical argument could also be made that the kind of long-suffering, sexless relationship between Reacher and Turner further illustrates the very real plight of a hapless child-raising couple.

As far as relationship politics goes, the film -- co-written by director Edward Zwick, and longtime work partner Marshall Herskovitz -- keeps trying to pull Reacher into the realm of the emotional, saddling him with not one but two females with actual feelings, but it's as if the film's entreaties keep bouncing off Reacher's broad chest like so many snap kicks.

The film takes pains to show Turner's own ability to take care of herself in a scrap -- they helpfully give her a thug of her own to dispatch at the film's climax -- but clearly her main purpose is to provide the essence of romantic interest without any of the actual complications of physicality. Instead, we get a pair of hyper-repressed Type-A mopes -- in one inexplicable scene, they walk around shirtless in front of each other in a hotel room while dispassionately discussing the case -- who never so much as brush their hands together, unless it's in service to grabbing a gun, or monkey-punching someone to the ground.

Other than the film's odd emphasis on Reacher's peculiar asexuality, the tired plot takes us through the senseless gibberish of the standard brainless action-thriller, resulting in yet another film in which Cruise's mandate remains sacrosanct. He might not always get the girl, but he never, ever loses a fight.

Near the beginning of the film, wrapping up the Oklahoma situation, Reacher tells a now-handcuffed crooked cop, "I'm the guy you didn't count on." He must have assumed the sheriff was too busy running his human trafficking operation to ever set foot in a multiplex. The rest of us knew exactly what to expect.

MovieStyle on 10/21/2016

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