Cruise Control: JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is a largely lackluster action movie that’s nonetheless further proof Cruise is one of our best action stars. He’s simply believable. In 2012, we first met his Jack Reacher, writer Lee Child’s ex-military drifter who specializes in helping people out of tight spots before leaving on the next bus out of town, with a compelling mystery, crackerjack plot, and crisp staging from writer-director Christopher McQuarrie. It made the character a good fit for this stage of Cruise’s persona. He’s aged into a presence of pure drive and effortful effortlessness. His Mission: Impossibles are the best way to see his smooth-yet-grizzled total confidence and sly dry humor, but Reacher allows him to play it in the lowest, coolest key. It’s not hard to imagine Lee Marvin or Clint Eastwood in the role fifty years ago. Here Reacher survives a low-functioning sequel with his coolness intact. It’s like a dud episode in a procedural you otherwise enjoy.

This time around, Reacher heads to Washington D.C. to meet an army friend (Cobie Smulders). Once there he discovers she’s in prison, framed for a crime he knows she wouldn’t commit. Turns out she’s run afoul of a scheming defense contractor who spies Reacher’s inquiries into her case and decides to frame him, too. So Reacher breaks her out of prison, then goes on the lamb to clear their names and bring down the mysterious arms-dealing scheme that can afford to send trained assassins all over the place. It’s technically a mystery, but it operates at a simple level, showing all the cards pretty early and then watching as Cruise and Smulders arrive at the conclusions of which we’re already well aware. I mean, one look at the hitman (Holt McCallany) hiding behind sunglasses and stubble, or the cadaverous General (Robert Knepper), and it’s obvious who the bad guys are and what their conspiracy is.

It plays like a highlight reel, all outwitting and reversals of power, Cruise swaggering into a room and outsmarting everyone or, when that fails, punching all the right guys to get the job done. There are some small pleasures to be found, like Reacher walloping a man in the head by punching through a car window. But under director Edward Zwick’s bland craftsmanship and co-writer Richard Wenk’s routine plotting, it’s a little mushy, overfamiliar, bland. We get a car chase, and it’s just screeching tires and inevitable conclusions. The gunfights are just mindless rounds and big booms. The fistfights are bruising, but inelegantly choreographed. And the central spine of investigation isn’t so much finding and piecing together clues as the characters luckily ending up in the exact right place for the story to keep churning them along. It’s like watching a smarter movie on fast forward, moving past each scene before it can settle into a better, more effective rhythm.

Aside from Cruise’s dependability, the most enjoyable aspect of this movie is its 80’s-sequel-style jerry-rigged family until. Cruise and Smulders end up watching out for a fifteen-year-old girl (Danika Yarosh) who needs their protection, leading to amusing scenes where she pouts and complains and the adults have to say things like, “now, listen here, young lady.” There’s even a whole to-do about the girl sneaking out to try some investigating of her own, leading to the stern paternal figures awkwardly falling into the sitcom “We were worried! Where were you?” speech. It’s not much, but it’s there, just one of a few fine small touches. Other fleeting pleasures include learning Smulders can do that Tom Cruise run: stiff spin standing straight up, rigid arms swinging with mechanical precision, a grim stare of determination sharpening the eyes. It’s funny to see them together, two perfectly speedy pedestrians hurtling the human body as fast as it can go. You take your mild enjoyment where you can get it in a polished boredom, a middle-of-the-road programmer. If we meet Reacher again, let’s hope it’s in a better movie.

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Up: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

What keeps the movies in Marvel’s Avengers multi-franchise franchise somewhat fresh is the way each film exists in a different setting and plays variations on different genres. They’re all shot in a bright house style, the tone always serious enough to generate suspense, but light enough to accommodate bantering between chummy characters. In other words, going into one of these movies you know exactly what you’re going to get, but not necessarily the way you’ll get it. Captain America: The First Avenger was a B-movie World War II picture with snarling Nazis, martyred scientists, and brave soldiers, with a square-jawed superpowered all-American hero in the center. Now its sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, finds the star spangled man dropped into a paranoid conspiracy actioner, danger from unexpected sources at every turn.

In this new film, the Captain is still the same old patriotic freedom fighter he always was. Captain America may not be the role Chris Evans was born to play, but, between his capacity for unsentimental earnestness and obvious classically handsome features, it’s certainly the superhero role he was born to play. After being frozen in a block of ice for 70 years, thawed out, welcomed into SHIELD (the fictional Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), and sent out to fight off an alien invasion with the help of Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk, he’s finding himself borderline disillusioned. He asks Director Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) why the intelligence community is ramping up pervasive worldwide surveillance, building a massive apparatus to predict trouble and arrange preemptive strikes. Fury wearily tells him the world has grown dangerous, and they must be prepared for anything. Cold comfort, that.

The film smartly pivots from stars-and-stripes propaganda to clammy paranoia. In the first action scene Captain America and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) free hostages on a freighter in a fanfare of military might. But it’s not long before a high-ranking SHIELD official is gunned down by an assassin, men in suits force good spies on dubious missions, and Fury whispers to the Captain a stern warning:  “no one can be trusted.” It’s a surprisingly sharp – and totally on-the-nose – commentary on contemporary concerns over NSA surveillance and intelligence agency overreach. Though, shadowy governmental conspiracies aren’t exactly only current. Robert Redford, with a history of appearing in paranoid thrillers from Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men to Sneakers and Spy Game, appears as a suit, exuding gravitas in a fun echo of the genre’s past.

What follows is a tangle of twists and turns punctuated with exciting, lengthy action sequences all around Washington D.C. as loyal SHIELD agents reveal dark intent and showy conspiracies are yanked into the light. The blows land harder for the film’s mercilessness when it comes to mortally wounding characters and institutions you’d think the Marvel Cinematic Universe would want to keep around. The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely moves quickly and coherently, dragging in familiar franchise faces (Sebastian Stan, Cobie Smulders, Hayley Atwell, and Jenny Agutter) while smoothly integrating new characters into the action. I particularly enjoyed Anthony Mackie as a former soldier who finds new reason to fight when Captain America calls upon him and quickly establishes an easy, warm friendship between them. It’s nice the movie takes time between the explosions and chaos to make new friends and keep the old, interested in some small way in relationships and how they play out through slam-bang rat-a-tat movement.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, sitcom veterans who, Community paintball episodes aside, make a big action debut here, filming the action in a clean and comprehensible style. The early boat-set sequence includes plenty of shots that refreshingly reveal the entire action head-to-toe, sometimes for seconds at a time. In later car chases, gun battles, fisticuffs, and aerial commotions, they cut rather deftly between perspectives and don’t let chaotic close-up inserts confuse too badly. The majority of the action – a one-against-ten fistfight in an elevator, a man in a winged jetpack outsmarting heat-seeking missiles – is cleverly staged. It’s all so engaging and enjoyable that it’s a bit of a let down to admit it’s also all a tad exhausting in the end. It’s exciting and it wore me out. After over two hours with often pervasive rounds of gunfire – minions just shoot and shoot and shoot, the body count looming large – it grows wearying. By the time the movie is well into its big blowout finale, twists and surprises largely in its rearview, I was ready for the punching and shooting to reach their inevitable end. It’s fun, but I had my fill.

Still, reliable and dependable, this Marvel universe of interlocking franchises has dropped another quality product off of the assembly line. At worst, these films can feel slight and predictable, pinned in by the corporate dictates of the overarching narrative. Much as I’ve enjoyed all of these movies to some extent or another, I’m interested, but not overly invested in the big picture. In individual films, moments of straight-faced near-campiness (anything Asgardian in the Thor movies), side pleasures (the first Captain America’s unexpected and delightful musical number), and funny supporting performances (Tom Hiddleston, Sam Rockwell, Kat Dennings, Tommy Lee Jones), stick with me the most. So it is to the filmmakers’ credit that in Captain America: The Winter Soldier they shake things up, providing all the expected thrills and smiles along with a welcome modicum of complexity to the characters' primary-colors comic book world as it crumbles around them in entertaining explosiveness.

Baby Daddy: DELIVERY MAN

There’s something sneakily warm, humane, and even a little moving at the center of Delivery Man, a cluttered, sickly sweet, and not particularly funny comedy that’s almost impossible to recommend without piling on caveats and disclaimers. It stars Vince Vaughn as one of his usual responsibility-resistant motormouths, this time a guy who is nearly fired by his father from the family business, crushed under a debt of thousands he owes some shady characters, and all-but-dumped by his exasperated girlfriend. On top of all this, he’s tracked down by an attorney who tells him the sperm bank to which he donated over 600 times over 20 years ago mistakenly overworked his samples and now 533 young people would like him to drop his anonymity and meet them. In fact, they’re suing him to do so. What a predicament. With such a strained comic premise, the film has to work hard to back into its gooey sentimentality, but earns some unexpected charm along the way.

What I liked best about the film was the diversity of children Vaughn’s character suddenly discovers he fathered in scenes that play well with what the characters know or don't know about the situation. We find out about the kids as he does, impulsively picking them one by one out of a case file his lawyer (likably played by Parks & Recreation’s Chris Pratt) advises him not to open. If he didn’t want him to open it, why does he give him a copy? But I digress. Vaughn approaches them one at a time, acting only as a stranger to them. He discovers his secret children are a varied bunch: a struggling actor, a professional basketball player, an amiable drunk college kid, a busker, a drug addict, a historical reenactor, a special needs child, and more. These young people in their teens and twenties have only their unknown father in common. Some he’s immediately proud of. Others he feels the need to help. Still others, he’s disappointed when confronted with their life situations. But the sneakily humane and moving part is the way he’s instantly and totally struck with deep fatherly love for them, proud of them simply for existing.

Andrew Solomon’s recent extraordinary book Far from the Tree powerfully explores the concept of parents truly, deeply, fully loving children who are not what they would expect or have hoped for in a variety of difficult situations. I never would’ve guessed that an otherwise silly and misshapen trifle like Delivery Man would rub up against the same nerve as this great book, but so it does. When Vaughn tells his lawyer that he wants to be their guardian angel, it’s sweet. The concept may be wildly impractical – who could possibly be a real present father to over 500 kids, most of whom are already legally adults? – but the core sentiment rings with some degree of authenticity about finding and accepting one’s family and all the diversity of experiences that can encompass.

Would that the film devoted less time to financial thugs who show up precisely twice to threaten Vaughn to pay up. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why did they lend him money? Who knows? The movie cares not a bit about the answer, failing to characterize the threat even a token amount. Similarly, there’s an unfortunate detour involving one of Vaughn’s mystery kids who learns his father’s identity and attempts to extort some father-son bonding time. These two malnourished subplots load down the film with unnecessary clutter, distracting from the emotional journey that Vaughn would go through far more convincingly and poignantly without such contrivances.

In addition to the unfocused plotting, supporting roles are universally anemic, especially poor Cobie Smulders in the thankless girlfriend role that’s only around for the super schmaltzy but kind of effective emotional climax. Such problems come with the material, which Canadian writer-director Ken Scott is recycling from his own 2011 French-language film Starbuck. It’s too bad the process of remaking his own film didn’t allow him to clear away the tangle of distracting subplots that gathers up around the nice emotional center or write in some better jokes. The film is sweet and soft. But what makes it such a nagging disappointment is the missed opportunities. Instead of devoting time to that debt or extortion sidetracks, why not nod to the mothers of all these children, who are conspicuously missing entirely from the equation. What do they have to say about all this? In the end, it’s so focused on ending with a feel-good group hug of an ending, it’s hard not to feel at least a little cheated by how sloppily we got there.