Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

Live. Die. Repeat.

Grade: D +

Director: Edward Zwick

Starring: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Aldis Hodge, Patrick Heusinger and Danika Yarosh

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Whereas Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is his successful American appropriation of James Bond, Jack Reacher is a stillborn Jason Bourne. Now saddled with a title-cum-epitaph, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is a sequel nobody wants to a movie few remember.

With Christopher McQuarrie, director of the first Jack Reacher film in 2012, graduating to Cruise’s last M:I installment, Never Go Back is left with director Edward Zwick. Zwick previously worked with Cruise on The Last Samurai, but their sophomore collaboration comes off like a bad knockoff of a 1980s thriller, or a STARZ original movie.

It’s easier to list the ways this purported plot doesn’t make sense than how it might. In the midst of walking the earth and getting into adventures, Reacher (Cruise) decides to finally pay a visit to Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), his military police successor and new handler, presumably because she has a flirty phone voice. When he arrives back at Fort Dyer, he learns that Turner has been arrested for espionage in relation to the overseas shooting of a couple of military investigators.

It’s barely discernible why the bad guys want to frame Turner. But once Reacher starts asking questions, they suddenly decide to also target him, with the death of Turner’s military lawyer. Oh, by the way, Reacher discovers he’s been sued by a woman he doesn’t remember for paternity of a teenage girl, Samantha (Danika Yarosh), he didn’t know about.

It’s anyone guess why a shadowy military contractor and their hired heavy (Patrick Heusinger) decide to go after Reacher’s daughter, particularly after daddy starts protecting her, rather than the woman—who plays no part in the film—with whom he presumably had this child. In between, the cast runs around a lot, hamstrung by wooden dialogue and emotions. The actors, even the earnest and reliable Cruise, never appear in sync with each other or the director, who leans heavily on reaction shots and ham-fisted editing.

But it’s plot craters that cripple this misbegotten military potboiler. Supporting characters appear without much lead-up and then recede before being developed. When our trio use some IDs and credit cards Samantha stole to purchase plane tickets to New Orleans, the baddies are somehow immediately alerted, even though the only way they could is if the credit cards had already been reported stolen, in which case they probably couldn't be used them to buy airline tickets. Two paramilitary minions somehow make their way onto the same plane, where Reacher dispatches both midflight, one in clear view of the passenger cabin, without arousing any clamor.

It all ends in The Big Easy, where the interior scenes—including a couple of false endings, one prompted by that dang stolen credit card somehow still working—look like they were filmed on the set of a high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s capped by a howler of a denouement that questions how the paternity suit against Reacher could ever exist in the first place.

Any invitation to suspend disbelief for Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is countered by the fact that the film’s labyrinthine narrative invites such scrutiny, and that the already mind-numbing narrative amounts to even less without its darting plotlines propelling it. If this is what the Jack Reacher films will give us, let’s all agree to never go back.

Delivery Man

I can only afford college tuition for one of you,

so let the Hunger Games begin!

Grade: C –

Director: Ken Scott

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Chris Pratt and Cobie Smulders

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 43 min.

Delivery Man is an American remake of a French-Canadian film, which seems appropriate since its lumbering script sounds like it was rendered using Google Translate. Writer-director Ken Scott appropriates his 2011 movie Starbuck about a prolific sperm donor into a Vince Vaughn vehicle that manages to neuter its hyperactive star.

David Wozniak (Vaughn) is a delivery man for his family’s New York City butcher shop. He’s also a hopeless screw-up, whether its failing to properly deliver uniforms for the business’ rec basketball team or going weeks without contacting Emma (Cobie Smulders), his pregnant girlfriend. The only thing David was apparently ever good at was donating sperm 20 years ago under the alias Starbuck. One day, a lawyer appears to inform David that mismanagement by the fertility clinic resulted in him fathering 533 children, and that 142 of them now want to pierce David’s confidentiality agreement with the clinic and learn the identity of their biological sire.

As legal wrangling ensues, David sifts through a dossier containing the bios of his children and drops like a deux ex machina into their lives to help with their problems while never revealing his true identity. There’s a drug-addicted daughter, a frustrated actor stuck in a dead-end job as a barista, and a struggling street musician. There’s a gay son, a black daughter and a severely handicapped boy (who cannot speak or otherwise communicate, calling into question how he expressed a desire to find out his biological father). One’s also a professional basketball player spotlighted with no further elaboration, probably so Vaughn could film at a Knicks game.

Delivery Man wanders aimlessly between light-hearted and treacly without ably conveying either emotion, particularly Vaughn and his pained efforts. There’s the obvious illogic of David appearing in the lives of dozens of people and, later, support group cookouts with all his children without anyone getting suspicious. Moreover, it’s baffling how Starbuck becomes an object of national derision for something that wasn’t wrong or his fault. As Brett (Chris Pratt, seemingly medicated), David’s bumbling attorney, argues during a rare moment of lucidity, none of these children would be here if it wasn’t for Starbuck.

Nary a moment is devoted to the legal mothers and fathers of these children; it’s as if they don’t exist. And the subplot involving David and Emma’s pending parenthood lurks in the background until a hasty resolution over the film’s final minutes.

From its wandering narrative to its dim-witted dialogue, Delivery Man has the earmarks of a screenplay grounded in its fertile premise that no one realized couldn’t gestate into a feature-length film until midway through production.

Safe Haven

Do you hear banjos playing, too?

Grade: C +
Director: Lasse Hallström
Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, David Lyons, Cobie Smulders and Mimi Kirkland
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 55 min.

There are three essential elements to a Nicholas Sparks’ story: death, tears and North Carolina. Safe Haven, the eighth Sparks film adaptation but only the third filmed entirely in the Tar Heel state (following A Walk to Remember and Nights in Rodanthe), is set in the sleepy real-life village of Southport, situated at the confluence of the Cape Fear River, Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean. We see depictions of open-air restaurants along the marsh, nights spent gigging for fish and a recreation of the town’s renowned annual Fourth of July festival.

This idyllic setting is also the impromptu hideaway for “Katie” (Julianne Hough), the assumed name adopted by a perky blond on the run from flashbacks of a bloody knife and a prone victim, along with Kevin, an alcoholic Boston detective (David Lyons) giving dogged chase. Katie wants to lay low, so naturally she rents a remote, delipidated shack that everyone knows about, which needs repairs that send Katie trodding into the middle of town every day in search of supplies.

No bother—Katie is immediately embraced by the natives, particularly Alex (Josh Duhamel), a 30-something widower and father who looks like, well, Josh Duhamel. Despite knowing little about Katie (like her true identity, for starters), the wanted poster with her face on it hanging in the local police station (this film isn’t very kind to the Southport PD) and the fact that she attracts all manner of mayhem to town, Alex decides Katie is the one to replace his recently deceased wife and raise his two moppets, including a daughter played by Raleigh native Mimi Kirkland.

In fairness, there’s enough chemistry between Duhamel and Hough to carry this Hallmark Movie Channel refugee through its many banal patches. Director Lasse Hallström—helming his second Sparks adaptation (Dear John)—competently captures the beatific coastal tableaux, although his crosscuts to Kevin’s manic search back in faux-Boston are drab filler.

Still, while there’s the proverbial death along the way, you nearly make it through without any tears … until a jaw-dropping, Shyamalan-ian denouement that’s just as liable to prompt eye-rolling as it is to send sniffles echoing throughout the theater. Ultimately, the big beneficiary here is the Southport-Oak Island Area Chamber of Commerce. The rest of Safe Haven plays it safe.