- Jack Reacher: Never Go Back sensibly ignores its own subtitle's advice, choosing instead to return to a formula that worked pretty well in the first film. Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) is still a churlish drifter, this time trying to protect an innocent army major named Turner (Cobie Smulders). The two hadn't even met in person until he broke her out of jail, but Reacher had previously helped Turner thwart a human smuggling ring and, frankly, is a creepy enough guy to fall in love with a woman over the phone. Desperate and on the run, Turner finds herself accused of espionage, her replacement (Holt McCallany) may be framing her, her former subordinates (Aldis Hodge) are hunting her down, her lawyer (Robert Catrini) isn't doing enough to help, and a team of mercenaries led by The Hunter (Patrick Heusinger) is trying to kill her. Time for Jack Reacher to step in and make things both better and worse.
- The new ingredients this time around primarily involve the film's two female characters, Turner and a teenage girl named Samantha Dutton (Danika Yarosh). Unlike the average damsel-in-distress, Turner is more than capable of defending herself and would normally be the most dangerous person in the room, were she not traveling with Jack Reacher. Although Dutton hasn't had the benefits of Turner's military training, being an orphan forced her to learn some survival skills that come in handy once she is targeted for possibly being Reacher's illegitimate daughter. In other words, neither woman is completely helpless, even though both end up getting saved by Reacher multiple times. We'll count that as a step in the right direction.
- Otherwise, the film is a largely unremarkable sequel that doesn't quite live up to the surprising adequacy of the first film. The direction, by Edward Zwick, deploys some truly gimmicky sped-up black and white flashback footage that feels borrowed from some lesser TV crime procedural. The music and pacing are direct descendents of the Bourne school of filmmaking, even if the camerawork is mercifully steady in comparison. The film's biggest problem, however, may be its lack of a memorable villain. Whereas the first Jack Reacher brilliantly cast Werner Herzog as a finger-chewing baddie, this one stumbles along with Robert Knepper and a stable of interchangeable hired goons that never really present much of a threat to anybody. Although Cruise, Smulders, and Yarosh all turn in satisfactory performances, the film just isn't quite worth the effort.
- Based on Lee Child's novel of the same name.
