JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK (2016)
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2017 David N. Butterworth

** (out of ****)

Now that we've all moved on from the height thing--Jack Reacher is 6ft.
5in.; Tom Cruise (who plays him) is not--we can finally focus on the film series itself and ask ourselves, do we really need another franchise with a tall-ish vigilante drifter cracking heads? The short answer is probably
not: as realized on screen there's nothing particularly fresh or
interesting about author Lee Child's former Army Military Police Corps
major who flits about the U.S. doing odd jobs while encountering sickos
with penchants for genital mutilation. But I didn't doze off watching
"Jack Reacher: Never Go Back," even late into the night, so *something*
must have kept my attention, and not just Cobie Smulders (and she does!) of TV's "How I Met Your Mother," who plays Major Susan Turner with whom
Reacher has worked, remotely, and whom he finds suspiciously imprisoned on espionage charges when he returns to Washington, D.C. after busting up a
human trafficking ring (on his own dime of course). Not only that, but
Reacher also discovers that, at the advanced age of "42" (Cruise gains a
foot and loses a decade!), he may be Dad to an adolescent girl, Samantha
(she's played by Danika Yarosh) so soon he's lugging around *twice* as many women as he did in the first film (the lone Rosamund Pike) as he goes about
the business of figuring out who's framing Turner and why, pursued by
Patrick Heusinger's stock assassin--so much for Reacher's discrete
vigilante drifter cover. It's hard to recommend a film as formulaic as
this one, with absolutely nothing we haven't seen before, but director
Edward Zwick (who previously worked with Cruise on 2003's "The Last
Samurai") keeps things hurried and intense and even though the film clocks
in at a little under two hours it only feels half that long. I dunno;
maybe I *did* fall asleep after all.

--
David N. Butterworth
rec.arts.movies.reviews
butterworthdavidn@gmail.com

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