His contact at his old job, when he needs help (or likelier, has help to offer), is one Maj. Ex-Army major Jack Reacher (Cruise) has been doing his thing, floating around America & using his training as a high-level member of the military police to right wrongs and make the world safer. The action, this time around, is a perfectly straightforward, clear-cut military thriller. There's also some utterly baffling editing, which isn't a Zwick specialty, as far as I can recall but anyway, Billy Weber frequently cuts within dialogue scenes to change angles on the same subject, and I'm damned if I know why or ultimately whose fault it is, but it makes the thing feel busy to no real purpose. Making an action film is at least a change of pace for the director (unlike everything else he's made in the 21st Century, you'd never suspect it was green-lit in the hopes of snagging a few Oscar nominations), but it feels like his movies: bland direction of actors, unnecessarily wide shots, scenes that move slower than one might wish for. Since then - and before then, to be strictly fair - Zwick's output has been about as consistent as it is possible for a director to be: never very good & never very bad, but always occupying a very carefully-manicured place of middlebrow respectability. It is in this respect a perfect exemplar of the career of director Edward Zwick, replacing Christopher McQuarrie (who has been promoted to making Cruise's Mission: Impossibles), and who previously worked with the producer-star on The Last Samurai, lo these 13 years ago. Not being 'bad' is the most important thing in the whole world to Never Go Back, while being 'good' is no priority at all. It is, in fact, specifically and conspicuously not 'bad'. Now, I'm not saying that Never Go Back is 'bad'. No, for that, we need to turn to its sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. It is certainly not what it looked like from its ad campaign: a schlocky, paint-by-numbers detective action picture with Tom Cruise's slightly miscast charisma and absolutely nothing else to recommend it.

Jack Reacher, back in 2012, was no masterpiece, but it's a damn solid action thriller with an admirably unfussy star turn from Tom Cruise, a phenomenally colorful villain played by Werner Herzog, and it is blessed with a plot that splits the difference between 'twisty' and 'generic as all hell' exactly where you'd like to for the kind of film that's good enough to be remembered with a robust '.oh yeah, I liked that'.

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