Checked out the new Tom Cruise action flick Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, the sequel to the original Jack Reacher from a couple years ago. That was a surprisingly decent, low-ambition, narrow scoped action flick – not really great but good enough. This sequel is also a low-ambition, good enough action flick but a fair step down from the original. It’s a fine movie, it gets the job done, but it also doesn’t try very hard and doesn’t even have the few perks the original had (like a solid opener, a good car chase, and Werner Herzog being max Werner Herzog).
So Cruise returns to the ex-military Jack Reacher character who seems to live in a 70s tv show, travelling the country to find local problems and help people in trouble. In this one, he’s made phone buddies with Colby Smulders (Maria Hill from the Marvel films), a major in Washington DC. He decides to drop by for a visit only to find that she’s lost her command and has been charged for a crime she didn’t get commit. Then he gets charged for a crime he didn’t commit. Then he gets accused of being a dead-beat dad for a teen girl he may or many not have created. Can he figure out the conspiracy in the military that’s framing everyone, save his maybe-girlfriend, and figure out if this teen girl is his (and if it matters if she is or not)?
It occurs to me that Tom Cruise is trying to create a franchise he can star in between high-concept, hundred million+ budgets Mission Impossible movies. This series is grounded in a kind of less ambitious, smaller-budgeted, more-real-world story (not that the action is possible, but it doesn’t involve hanging off the side of an airplane or climbing outside the world’s tallest building). To that extent, sure, not every movie has to be the biggest slam bang action flick – if this is the series that delivers up pretty generic but not borring action movie throwback stuff, I guess that’s cool.
See the movie. Or not. You know, whatever. You can live without this film but if you are ok with low concept, low ambition action flicks that don’t strive for much, then this is a decent middle-ground. Tom Cruise can play in this toybox in between bigger movies and that’s fine. Dude doesn’t have to save the world every movie.
Score: 74