There are 20 Jack Reacher books. Let that sink in for a while. One released every year since 1997 and two in 2010. Lee Child, like his former-military protagonist: Jack Reacher, is a mean machine. As I’ve said before and I will reiterate again, it’s Hollywood’s favourite pastime to make big budget blockbusters out of books, even the mildly successful ones. And they do love their sequels. So when the two come together, it’s a winning formula right? 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 film genre, looks like the years and effects of being a Scientologist are catching up on him. Nonetheless, he efficiently does what Reacher is supposed to: fight a gang of men, fall from buildings and still remain 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 DC to see Major Susan Turner (played by a perpetually smouldering Cobie Smulders), she’s been dismissed from her rank on 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 at the Army. Reacher’s got a 15-year-old daughter, Sam (Danika Yarosh) whose character is just plain annoying and inevitably always in trouble.
What starts out as a high-paced exciting action-fuelled film soon unravels to become a family drama. So while we’re watching Reacher and Turner, run, run, run, one time too many to get to places (all this without breaking a sweat), there’s a teenager that needs to be rescued. Why? Well because, as his daughter, she automatically becomes a target for the bad guys – who are trying to silence Turner – but have now made Reacher their primary enemy.
The film’s primary plotline 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 between Reacher and Sam. For her part, Smulders plays a convincing 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 about the film. Like blockbusters are wont to do, this strong, independent woman remains true to her character till the end. And when her subordinates salute her as she walks by, you know director Edward Zwick has done something right.
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.
