Film Review: Jack Reacher - Never Go Back

Star power doesn’t work any more.  There was a time not so long back that branding a film’s poster with ‘Starring Julia Roberts’, ‘Starring Tom Hanks’, ‘Starring Bruce Willis’ and so forth was enough to guarantee at least a moderate hit.  These days, franchises and recognisable properties are more important than the stars themselves. Those three have all endured struggles of late and today’s big stars are often in favour of doing odd, challenging films rather than guaranteed hits (see DiCaprio in The Revenant or Brad Pitt in The Tree Of Life).

Tom Cruise was easily at the top of that list for a time but looking at his C.V. for the last ten years, anything approaching a hit for him as been an existing franchise or based on something that’s already popular.  It’s a shame, because Live, Die, Repeat and Valkyrie weren’t half bad.  Star power has waned so badly that I know people who would actively avoid a film because of the star.  Normally, that star is Tom Cruise.

Disobeying the law of diminishing returns, the Mission: Impossible franchise goes from strength to strength, with the last two films probably the best in the series.  Never Go Back sees Cruise attempt to cement a second franchise in the public eye, with Lee Child’s ex-military drifter Jack Reacher now looking like his new pet project.  Reacher is already a popular character, with 19 published novels, but it helps that the film is really good too.

2012’s Christopher McQuarrie-directed Jack Reacher was surprisingly good.  On paper it was a seen-it-before thriller; an ex-army hard ass working outside the law to solve a crime, the project nothing more than an ego boost with a hilariously miscast short-arse star playing 6’5” Reacher.  Well paper counts for shit and the film boasted intrigue, action and a surprisingly brutal turn from Cruise.  It did respectably well and Cruise, staying on board as star and producer, hired The Last Samurai director Edward Zwick for Reacher Round 2.

A more complicated plot involving shady arms deals and conspiracies among Generals is not the film’s strong suit, neither is a 2^nd act slowdown, with Zwick often getting too bogged down in details.  However when Never Go Back does well, it does really well.  Grouping Reacher with Cobie Smulders’ tough Lieutenant Turner and a 15 year-old kid (Danika Yarosh) who may or may not be his daughter is a smart move, adding emotional stakes and some welcome peril to somebody other than Reacher himself.

Cruise seldom gets the credit he deserves as an actor.  Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut and maybe Interview With The Vampire aside. Now aged 54, his matinee idol looks are starting to fill with crags and this lends him a roughness and maturity which suit Reacher down to the ground. He nails the comic timing and emotional moments when he needs to.  He can still do the action beats, too, and more convincingly than, say, Liam Neeson, whose perennial ‘ageing hard man’ roles seem more motivated by money than they are interest in the material.  Never Go Back sees Reacher up against an effective villain in Patrick Heusinger’s nameless assassin. Heusinger adds shades of humour and menace to a character which you otherwise would have seen in at least 4 of the Bourne films, giving Reacher something to work against which he didn’t really get from Jai Courtney or Werner Herzog in the first film.  The Big Bad here is played by Robert Knepper of Twin Peaks and Prison Break fame. This doesn’t quite work: since Knepper is so associated with playing bastards there’s no way he could conceivably play a virtuous character.

My only other gripe is with the ending, which, after a satisfyingly brutal (for a 12A-rated film) fistfight, wraps things up in too neat a package which borders on twee.  With this film, Jack Reacher is becoming established alongside the outside-the-law, one man army sub-genre that includes the likes of Bourne, Taken, John Wick and The Equalizer.  That said, there are parts of this that feel a little familiar but not enough to spoil it.

A couple of minor issues aside, Never Go Back is a more than solid thriller. And in a time where audiences seem less and less adventurous, flocking to familiar properties again and again, there is room for another franchise if they’re as well made as Reacher’s two outings.  Cruise is clearly invested in the project and has made sure that the standard remains high despite the change in creative input.  The title may say never go back, but I personally hope that Jack Reacher will return.