The first "Jack Reacher" was perfectly well done nonsensical pulp. The character of Jack Reacher, as I gathered from that film and from a little bit of info about Lee Child's numerous novels, is a macho paladin, an ex-army Major who now wanders the US with little cash and few possessions, doing heroic deeds just because of the pure awesomeness of his nature. The fact that in the books he's ridiculously tall and in the films he's played by the not-quite-as-tall Tom Cruise doesn't particularly matter, in every other way Cruise epitomised the "I'm right and everybody else is wrong" arrogance of a pup-fiction protagonist.
"Never Go Back" softens this a bit (possibly because it can't quite go to the almost self-parodistic lengths of the first one), introducing Major Turner (Cobie Smulders), who's inherited Reacher's old job and has a phone correspondence with him. When he eventually shows up to meet her in Washington, she turns out to have been accused of treason - and Reacher therefore is compelled to clear her name, via the ever popular "beating up a whole lot of goons" method.
A scrappier, more down-and-dirty franchise than the glossy "Mission Impossible" series, this one does attempt to soften the edges a tad - by allowing Smulders to be right about things occasionally, and by introducing a 15 year old who could possibly be Reacher's daughter as a tag-along-cum-occasional-hostage. It putters along reasonably (although this also lacks the iconic villainy that Werner Herzog gave the first film), with a lot of quality punching people in the head, but this is pretty much an airport novel of a film - you're unlikely to remember much of this after you left the cinema but you may enjoy it while you're there.
No comments:
Post a Comment