When it's four years between a film and its sequel, one begins to wonder if we really NEEDED the second film.
You'll probably still be wondering that after the adequately entertaining but predictable JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK.
Tom Cruise returns as the former agent, current do-gooder drifter with incredible skills at taking down plenty of bad guys.
When a current colleague (Cobie Smulders of The Avengers) is suddenly thrown in jail under mysterious circumstances, Reacher digs in and finds a massive conspiracy that's so interchangeable with any season of "24" that I cant really remember the details a week later.
Luckily, Cruise and company stage some great action sequences with plenty of gunfire and explosions, if that's your kind of thing.
Unluckily, they squeeze in a subplot about a troubled teen that may or may not be Reacher's daughter and of course said teen ends up on the run with Reacher and Turner, becoming their rebellious, "too dumb to be good at hiding from standard-issue bad guys" third wheel.
Cruise is reliably good but Director Edward Zwick, whose made some terrific films like "Legends of the Fall" and "Glory" seems like he's slumming here, bringing very little of his usual style to the proceedings.
It's all rather harmless, satisfactory, enjoyable while it lasts but so weightless it just floats away like a weekly episode of any action show.
I'm thinking this may be the last we see of Reacher.
Inferior in every way to the original, NEVER GO BACK gets a C.
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