Jack Reacher, family-guy thug
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (out of 4) Starring Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Danika Yarosh and Patrick Heusinger. Directed by Edward Zwick. Opens Friday at major theatres. 118 minutes. PG
It may be pointless to observe that Tom Cruise’s bulked-up title vigilante Jack Reacher could do with some lightening up. Let’s try anyway.
Sure, he’s eventually going to punch out and/or kill whoever dares cross him. But does he have to be so darned grumpy about it?
In Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, which follows four years on from the 2012 debut of this slow-moving franchise, Cruise’s ex-Army drifter is once again playing the deadly introvert. He’d rather stare into a cup of diner coffee than explain to the cops why he’s left a heap of mean dudes on the pavement out front. He’s also prone to making bizarrely terse pre- dictions about how quickly said cops will regret bugging him.
He’s the same old Jack —“The guy you didn’t count on,” he answers to the inevitable “Who the hell are you?” question — and just two films in, he’s already one-note and wearisome.
He’s out to settle scores old and new — his former military mates and a maniacal killer named The Hunter (Patrick Heusinger) are after him — and then hit the road again. Rinse and repeat.
A little levity would help the movie, as James Bond would be the first to say. But neither Cruise nor director Edward Zwick, who previously did the lone-wolf thing with Cruise for The Last Samurai, seem much interested in that.
Once a pulp-novel thug, always a pulp-novel thug. Screenwriters Richard Wenk and Marshall Herskovitz team with Zwick to dutifully grind out the tough-guy talk, based on the 18th book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher empire. Two spirited women have been added to Reacher’s narrow realm: a female military investigator (Cobie Smulders), who could be a serious love interest if Hell froze over, and a rebellious teen (Danika Yarosh), who might have a past connection to Reacher. Both are drawn into a convoluted cat-and-mouse plot involving a lot of running, punching and shooting.
“You’re very intense, you know that?” the teen says to Reacher. Uh huh. The two women bring a touch of humanity to the man, making him almost seem like a family guy at times, albeit as unsmiling as always. They also contribute mightily to the serviceable action sequences, which are spread between Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, just because.
But they’re like two sunbeams trying to melt a glacier. When all is grunted and done, Jack’s unReachable.