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Tom Cruise and Cobie Smulders on the run - not as exciting as it should be |
Director: Edward Zwick
Cast: Tom Cruise (Jack Reacher), Cobie Smulders (Major Susan
Turner), Aldis Hodge (Captain Anthony Espin), Danika Yarosh (Samantha Dutton),
Patrick Heusinger (The Hunter), Holt McCallany (Colonel Sam Morgan), Robert
Knepper (General James Harkness)

Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) travels back to Washington DC to
visit Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), a Military Police officer who has
helped him with a number of problems in the past. He arrives, however, to find
her under arrest for espionage – and after he starts asking questions, he
quickly joins her in lock-up, under arrest for murder. Busting out of prison,
they go on the run together to try and find out who has framed them.
Now I loved the first Jack
Reacher film: I’ve seen it three times now and it has a brilliant
combination of well-cut action sequences, witty lines, an involving plot and
some interesting eccentric fringe characters (not least Werner Herzog’s Russian
mobster mastermind), which fleshed the movie out into an entertainingly
different man-gotta-do movie. This sequel shakes up the formula – but in doing
so makes itself much more of an identikit movie, full of tropes we’ve seen
before.
For starters, the main appeal of the first Reacher film was
the character himself: a loner who plays by his own rules, operating like some
sort of master-less samurai, was interestingly different; it was hard to
predict how he might react in different situations. Here, teaming him up with
Turner (good as Smulders is in the role) and a character who may-or-may-not-be
his daughter turns Reacher into just another leg of a mismatched trio, an odd
bunch on the run. Cruise tackles well Reacher’s conflicted reactions to taking
on a father-child bond that has never crossed his mind before, but adding this parental
element to the mix makes the movie start to feel like a high-class Taken reprise.
Secondly, Zwick’s direction doesn’t have the zing that the
rather dry and uninvolving plot needs to bring it to life. There is very little
of interest in the script, and no memorable lines at all. The best scene in the
film is Reacher’s introduction – practically the only scene that captures the
character’s slightly cocky defiance of authority, his seemingly omniscient
awareness of how events will unfold and his simmering potential for violence
coupled with a strong moral code. The storyline that built up to that opening
scene sounds really interesting: I wish the film had been about that. No scene
after that point really comes to life again. Zwick’s action directing is perfunctory
and he can’t add the visual wit that Christopher McQuarrie introduced to such
great effect in the first film.
Thirdly the story is just plain not that interesting. The
conspiracy is hard to fathom (or care about) and the villains are poorly
defined ciphers. In fact, outside of Smulders and Cruise, not a single actor
makes an impression in this film: each supporting character is little more than
a plot device, sketched with broad strokes. The family dynamic between
Reacher-Turner-Dutton feels rather old-hat and robs us of Reacher’s most unique
asset as a character – all part of turning the film into another
run-of-the-mill thriller. For a fourth or fifth film in the series, doing
something very different with the character might have worked: here we still
want to explore the loner.
That’s really harsh: it’s not a bad film, just a
disappointingly average one. There are some decent scenes and some grins.
Cruise and Smulders give good performances. I’m glad they made a Reacher
sequel. I just wish it had been a better one. I’m sorry, I can’t resist – this
is one film that you will probably Never
Go Back to.
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