Rating: D
Dir: Edward Zwick
Star: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger
Rarely has a film’s title ever been so prophetic. The makers truly shouldn’t have gone back. The only way the title could have been more accurate would be if the film was called Jack Reacher: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. Or perhaps, for reasons of pithiness, Jack Reacher: Save Yourselves. The first movie was no great shakes, but had its moments (mostly Werner Herzog) and a reasonably well-defined plot. This feels as if Zwick watched the first film, took careful notes on what worked, then did the complete opposite. For instance, who thought that what the Jack Reacher franchise needed to pep it up, was a 15-year-old girl suffering from a chronic case of Resting Teenage Bitch Face?
The crusade on which Reacher (Cruise) is involved is, like the first, a case of someone wrongfully accused, as part of a larger conspiracy. The victim is the soldier who had been sitting in his old office, Major Susan Turner (Smulders), who has been charged with espionage following the discovery of a compromising hard-drive. Reacher breaks her out of military prison, with remarkable ease, I must say. The trio go on the run, fending off attempts to silence them, while digging into a plot to sell surplus weapons to insurgents. Trio? Oh, yeah. For he got slapped with an absent father paternity suit while hoboing about. Now tagging along is Samantha (Yarosh), who might or might not be Reacher’s daughter and please kill me now.
The film might work better if you view it as a spoof of eighties action movies, for example where fugitives are apparently able to take cross-country flights without credible ID. There’s even a scene set in an Internet Cafe, which had me genuinely checking when this was made. I don’t think I’ve seen one in the past… twenty years? Speaking of period pieces, it’s a reunion of sorts for Zwick and Cruise, who made The Last Samurai in 2003. I didn’t enjoy that either, and here there’s almost no-one I’d describe as likeable. I read another review which said this attempted “to soften and humanize the character”. Came as a shock to me, since I found Reacher considerably more of a dick. [Mind you, that review was in Slate, so…]
We also endure a huge drop-off in antagonist quality. There wasn’t much Herzog in the original, but he still loomed over proceedings like a magnificent thundercloud. His replacement, Heusinger, plays “The Hunter”, and in those same meteorological terms, makes as little impression as five minutes of lackadaisical drizzle. I could never bring myself to care about either anyone involved, or the arms trafficking. The film opens with a sequence where Reacher sits calmly in a diner post-mayhem, awaiting the arrival of the authorities. When they show up, what transpires is highly satisfying. The problem is, I’d rather have seen the movie which led up to that moment. As far as this one is concerned, it’s downhill all the way.