Friday, October 21, 2016

Film Review - Jack Reacher Never Go Back (2016)

Jack Reacher Never Go Back is the sequel to 2012's Jack Reacher but this time Christopher McQuarrie has been replaced in the director's chair with Ed Zwick who made the Last Samurai in 2004 with Tom Cruise, here Cruise reprises the role of Reacher where he meets a US Army Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) who ends up in prison convicted of a crime she may well be innocent of.

Jack Reacher 1 was okay and a perfectly entertaining way to spend 2 hours having a relaxing time with a film but Jack Reacher 2 was simply pathetic just yet another example of the fact that 8 in 10 sequels simply don't work and it doesn't work for these reasons:

- Firstly the storyline of the film is not really all that interesting and after a while it becomes completely predictable in terms of "That will happen, that will happen, that will happen" and it pretty much does it is also a very boring movie to sit through and after a while I just didn't care about anything that happened.

- Secondly there is not one single action sequence in this film that I found to be exciting, memorable or tension filled, each of it has this kind of "Padded Knuckles" feeling which is a Simpsons joke where Jimbo beats up Bart for wearing Safety Padding and he says "This Padding's so easy on the Knuckles, I could punch all day" and each action scene feels exactly like that and of no doubt this was done to get that much coveted PG-13 rating which is just a joke.

And also when you compare the action here with the action from Mission Impossible Rogue Nation it falls completely short as it has none of the fun and excitement those scenes had such as the opening Airport hijack, the Underwater Information Retrieval without an Oxygen Tank or the Motorcycle Chase or indeed the fight at the Opera here its just some bash, bash, bash stuff with no invention or excitement in them at all.

- And lastly the performances are all very weak, Cruise looks bored throughout this entire film and I couldn't help but think it was like watching a Dog constantly being kept on a leash when people like Christopher McQuarrie and JJ Abrams have let him off it and well we saw him climbing the tallest building in the world or hanging off the plane as its taking off or doing the Motorcycle Chase without any safety gear and you felt or least I did a real sense of "My God this is crazy but also wildly exciting" but there's none of that here he just scowls through the whole thing.

Smulders fares little better as she just looks angry throughout the whole film and the girl who plays Samantha is forgettable though she does get a couple of good moments but the only person I liked seeing in this film was Robert Knepper who played Minister Antonius in the Mockingjay films he made me smile whenever he came on screen.

And so that was Jack Reacher 2, a boring sequel on almost every level and frankly wait for the Accountant on November 3rd, 1 out of 5.

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