"This Is Bigger Than I Imagined..."
During the opening credits to Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, there was an uncanny moment of laughter from the audience when we made aware to the notion that not only was the latest Lee Child big-screen adaptation starring Tom Cruise, it was also specifically, "A Tom Cruise Production", immediately evoking thoughts of that sketch from Little Britain in which Dennis Waterman has the desire to write the theme tune, sing the theme tune etc, etc. Perhaps regarded as a Tom Cruise-driven money booster therefore, with director Edward Zwick perhaps being top choice to lead the project due to their involvement together with The Last Samurai, the latest Jack Reacher was in danger of becoming a complete turkey and yet, whilst it isn't exactly groundbreaking, Never Go Back is a passably fun, strictly 12A action thriller which passes the time nicely but does little to break out of its' minimal existence.
In backing up the notion that Never Go Back is an undeniably and wildly strict 12A movie, kill-shots are edited away so quickly that for all the audience knows, Mr. Reacher may well have missed whilst one scene in particular comically shows one of the films' bad guys attempt to say a naughty word beginning with the letter F only to be buffered out so all we hear instead is a muffled "fuh". The editing and obvious cuts adhere to the now-favoured choice to gain the much wider appreciated 12A rating rather than a 15; a decision firmly based on economic reasons and whilst I'm rarely bothered by such trivial matters, Never Go Back suffers from being just another action flick, just with less Werner Herzog and more annoying sub-plots featuring 15 year old girls. To say the movie is both preposterous and predictable is an understatement but on-screen, the dynamic duo of Cruise and Cobie Smulders look like they are having enough fun to warrant its' short existence, even if it isn't quite the advocate for future Jack Reacher movies it might want to be.
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