Cruise proves again why he’s Cruise.
I like Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. I like this film the same way I like Commando, Roadhouse and Kick-boxer. They are my guilty pleasures. This latest adaption of Lee Child’s series of novels about a former military commander turned bruising do-gooder won’t reinvent the wheel but proves effecvtive when it sticks to Tom Cruise’s Reacher using his bare hands to dispatch a few scumbags. It works.
Now this isn’t Cruise at his most charismatic. The Mission Impossible films, now there’s the movie star we’ve known since forever. Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher is played for the most part as – stone; a hard rock of a man with a granite soul. Like John Rambo, Reacher gets the job done. Here, Reacher returns to his old military stomping grounds to find a colleague (Cobie Smulders) mysteriously vanished and considered a traitor accused of espionage.
You know why I like these films? They’re simple. Good guys versus bad guys. No need for complex plots and fancy technology. Films like this live and breath with their ability to follow the plot, root for the hero and hope the villain gets it in the end. The film is directed by Edward Zwick, a filmmaker who usually paints on a massive canvas (Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai) and who once in a while knocks it out of the park with more intimate fare (About Last Night, Love and Other Drugs). It’s a slick Hollywood machine that chugs along nicely and is worth a trip to the movies. It’s entertainment. Guilty pleasure as it might be to some, there’s nothing wrong with that.
