Jack Reacher was one of 2012's more pleasant surprises. Written and directed by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, The Way of the Gun), this tightly scripted and surprisingly funny thriller featured a compelling, no-nonsense hero in the form of Tom Cruise's Reacher and a surprising, chilling, Teutonic villain in the form of legendary director Werner Herzog. It may not have been high art, but it was damn fun.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is, unfortunately, a far inferior sequel, one saddled with bland villains and a meandering plot that tries, and fails, to get us to care about Reacher's personal life.
After a prologue in which Reacher takes down a corrupt Texas cop selling illegal immigrants into indentured servitude, or something, our wandering hero hits the road again. He's headed toward Washington, D.C.—hitchhiking, taking buses, staying off the grid—to meet up with Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), the head of the military police unit Reacher commanded before he quit the service.
By the time he gets to D.C., however, Turner has been arrested and members of a shadowy group of Afghan-tested contractors modeled on Blackwater are following Reacher. They're also taking out members of Turner's team and would have killed Turner herself if not for a timely intervention by Reacher. While trying to unravel the mystery of the murderous mercenaries, Reacher must also protect Samantha Dayton (Danika Yarosh), a teen girl whose mother, unbeknownst to our hero, filed a paternity suit against Reacher.
Though the rest of the world seems to be abandoning him, I remain firmly on Team Tom Cruise, whose single-minded intensity is a perfect fit for the role of Reacher. Smulders is a remarkably handsome woman, and her no-nonsense style is similarly perfect for her role. Yarosh is fine as Samantha, though the character itself is kind of annoying, trafficking in a kind of extremely generic snotty teen girl humor that leaves no real impression after the fact.
The first Jack Reacher was subtly funny, turning what could have easily been generic action set pieces into chances for chuckles. The best example of this was Reacher's brawl against a couple of toughs in a tight corridor and bathroom, one that utilized the limitations of walls and ceilings in a way no film had since Raising Arizona's hilarious trailer fight. It was intense but clever, action-packed but comic. A pleasant surprise, in other words.
Edward Zwick, the director and cowriter of Never Go Back, lacks McQuarrie's gift for subtle physical humor, preferring to shoot far more generic martial arts action. Punch, kick, repeat; punch, kick, repeat; snap a neck or stomp down real hard or shoot a guy to finish things off. Never Go Back's fights are not incompetently shot or anything—Zwick has a decent feel for space and continuity, and Cruise has always brought a believable physicality to his work—but they're something that's probably a bit worse: boring.