What’s more, Zwick doesn’t even seem to be particularly interested in the larger case at hand. The villains are absolutely lousy (I know that Werner Herzog is a tough act to follow, but the script doesn’t even try to give Robert Knepper’s baddie anything substantive beyond “he’s greedy”), and their nefarious scheme is largely uninteresting. The larger problem is that Reacher and Turner are trapped in a lazy thriller that doesn’t have the fun twists and turns of the first movie. I have no doubt she could anchor an action franchise on par with Reacher or John Wick if she was given the opportunity. Watching Never Go Back, I know it will be maddening in the years to come when I see Smulders in movies and those movies aren’t action films where she’s the hero.
#TOM CRUISE JACK REACHER FILMS MOVIE#
Perhaps if the movie had just been Reacher and Turner it could have been on to something, but that’s mainly on the strength of Smulders’ performance. She’s also, inevitably, endangered by the bad guys at the climax of the film. And yet Samantha is shoehorned into scenes to force development that never really arrives. No one was asking the question, “What if Jack Reacher was a father figure?” It’s not an essential part of his character. There are moments where Samantha’s not completely insufferable, but those moments are few and far between. He still does those things in Never Go Back, but he’s saddled with relationships that don’t make Reacher, the guy we showed up to see, any better.Īlso, a word of advice to any screenwriter or producer or director who’s thinking, “You know what this action movie is missing? A smart-ass teenager.”: Don’t. He’s largely a solitary character, and he does two things: 1) kick butt 2) solve mysteries. The supporting characters in that movie are important, but they don’t hang off of Reacher. But what McQuarrie was offering in 2012’s Jack Reacher was still working fine. You shake up the formula because the formula has started to go a little stale.
If this were the fourth or fifth Jack Reacher film, I could maybe understand giving the character a surrogate family to help show another side of him. Realizing that both Turner and Samantha are in danger from shadowy forces, Reacher springs to the rescue and takes them both along as they try to figure out who framed Turner and who’s out to kill them. To make matters worse, Reacher’s also being hit with a paternity suit that claims he’s the father of 15-year-old foster kid, Samantha Dayton ( Danika Yarosh). However, when Reacher comes to Turner’s office, he discovers that she’s been arrested for espionage. to meet up with Major Susan Turner (Smulders), an officer who commands his old unit and a trusted friend despite the two never having met in person before.
The story picks up with Reacher (Cruise) headed to Washington, D.C. The script drowns in a convoluted plot, there are unnecessary flourishes like “Reacher-vision”, and while Cruise still has a handle on the character, his adventure this time around is far less interesting despite a strong supporting performance from Cobie Smulders. He saddles the character with a surrogate family when one isn’t called for, and the attempt to soften Reacher takes away the character’s edginess and unpredictability. It was a tonic for the modern, CGI-packed blockbuster.įour years later and Jack Reacher has returned with Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, but new director Edward Zwick doesn’t understand what makes Reacher tick. McQuarrie adapted Lee Child’s One Shot into a terrific action vehicle for Cruise that ran on bravado and lo-fi thrills. We knew he could be an action star because of the Mission: Impossible movies, but it’s one thing to be a gadget-wielding super-spy, and it’s another to be a cold, steely-eyed drifter who’s tough as nails. It adapts a character that Tom Cruise is completely unsuited for physically (in the books, Reacher is built more like Dwayne Johnson) and taps into a stone-cold resolve many of us didn’t think Cruise was capable of.
Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher is one of the better action films of the last five years.
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