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.

Equalize This: THE EQUALIZER

It seems like every time you turn around there’s another older actor playing a reluctant man of violence in a movie that starts with a bunch of bad guys and ends with the bad guys dead. The latest iteration is The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington. It’s a good reminder that he kicked off the most recent reemergence of this whole subgenre with Man on Fire a decade ago. Sorry, Liam Neeson, but that’s the real Taken catalyst. Washington, like Neeson, is a good center of calm and authority on which to build one of these thriller machines. In this case, though, there’s not much else to back him up.

We first meet Washington working as the manager of a Home Depot knockoff. He’s a likeable guy who loves to help everyone he meets. He’s an encouraging life coach for a portly employee (Johnny Skourtis) trying to lose weight. He’s nice to a teen prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) who frequents his favorite diner, telling her she can be anything she wants to be. But because Denzel Washington plays this normal guy, and because we see his quiet life, spare apartment, and simple routines, it’s obvious there’s more to him than anyone knows. Sure enough, he has a secret dark past that’ll serve him well in the coming conflict. What follows is empty formula, but at least Washington’s the right man for the job. Without him, it would be nothing. I mean, it’s still nothing, but at least a fine actor picked up a good paycheck.

Denzel wants to get Moretz her freedom after her pimp beats her to the point of hospitalization. He decides to get bloody revenge on her behalf. Yes, this is sadly yet another thriller for which women exist only as objects to motivate men in one way or another. Pulling out his fast reflexes and powers of observation, Denzel kills the slimy Russians who own her. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but, oops, they were low-level crime syndicate guys and now a major enforcer (Marton Csokas) is coming to town to kill him. There’s a whole bunch of bad guys, from street thugs to crooked cops, and Denzel’s out to kill them all. He’s not happy about it, which means he doesn’t get much opportunity to break out his infectious grin. He stabs, shoots, hangs, explodes, power-drills, and otherwise bloodies everyone who gets in the way of throwing this criminal organization a going-out-of-business bash.

Richard Wenk’s script, loosely based on the 1980’s TV series, is anything but subtle. What you see is what you get. What it promises – not much – it delivers – barely. Chucking even simple allusion out the window, the movie prefers instead to bring a hardcover copy of The Old Man and the Sea or Don Quixote on screen and have characters talk about it in terms just vague enough it could relate either to the books or to their situations. Get it? Get it? Uh, yeah. That’s hard to miss.

The movie’s full of stock characters and derivative situations ever so slightly elevated by Hollywood slickness. Director Antoine Fuqua stages the violence capably, functionally, with some style and exaggerated pulp satisfaction. He loves the violence. Why else pan back to the drill bit to see dripping blood after heavily implying its use? But he loves Denzel more. The last time they worked together was 2001’s Training Day, a lively cop thriller that won Washington his Oscar. This so isn’t that. We get slow motion hero shots, lingering close-ups, and, of course, the old walk away from an explosion you caused without looking back or flinching even a little bit. This is a movie that thinks Denzel is awesome. Good thing he is. It’s everything that’s not him that falls flat. The plot has complications, but it’s not complicated. It’s painfully obvious what will happen between splashes of carnage and takes forever getting there. Fuqua shoots exposition and dialogue in flavorless fashion, marking time until the killing starts back up.

It is essentially an inverted slasher film type of macho rescuer fantasy. The unstoppable, unflappable killer is our hero. The victims are all unambiguously evil. Our world is full of scary, seemingly unsolvable problems and dangers. Movies like The Equalizer provide a dangerous fantasy version of our insecure reality in which a skilled man shows up shooting until everything is solved. This approach is a common, blunt force, actioner technique, but in a story so hollow and rote it’s hard to take. The villains are underwritten. The hero is every sad, silent tough guy we’ve ever seen. The result is a flashy, vacuous product that simplifies complex issues to something solvable through brute strength and righteous anger. But did it have to be all that and boring too?