Like its predecessor, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back has a terrible title and looks on the surface like a rote exercise in Tom Cruise’s flinty stares and square-jawed grimacing, but it actually exceeds expectations in just about every way, even if it never aspires to all that much. It’s an old-school, red-blooded action vehicle with a little bit of sentimentality mixed in for good measure, and in this age of overstuffed, CGI-loaded blockbuster behemoths, a movie that trades primarily in the classical action ingredients—shoot-outs, car chases, foot races, and fisticuffs—doesn’t feel like such a bad thing.

Cruise reprises his role as the titular Jack Reacher, a former Major in the United States Army Military Police Corps who left the military and now works on his own as a kind of free-lance investigator and vigilante. Based on the 2013 novel by Lee Child, the 18th in his Jack Reacher series, the story finds Reacher trying to clear Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), the head of police at a Virginia military base with whom Reacher had been developing a long-distance relationship after they worked together to bust a corrupt sheriff in Texas. When Reacher finally arrives at the base, he discovers that Major Turner has been arrested and charged with treason, which he very quickly deduces is a frame to cover up a corrupt military operation. Reacher breaks her out of prison and they go on the run together, followed doggedly by military police investigator Espin (Aldis Hodge) and a ruthless assassin known only as The Hunter (Patrick Heusinger).

There’s an added wrinkle in the form of a 16-year-old girl named Samantha (Danika Yarosh) who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter from a relationship he doesn’t even remember. Samantha, who currently lives in foster care since her mom is a recovering junkie, quickly becomes a target for The Hunter as a means of getting at Reacher, so he and Turner must take her with them (their attempt to hide her at a private boarding school is thwarted by the ill-timed use of a cell phone). Reacher, ever the stoic professional, doesn’t have much interest in bonding with a surly, streetwise teenager, and one of the film’s pleasures is the way his hard exterior is ever so slowly cracked by the very idea that this girl might be his daughter. It helps that Samantha is very much his spitting image, at least in terms of temperament, plus he has romantic inclinations toward Turner, which results in one of the film’s sharpest scenes where he unthinkingly sticks her in the rote female role despite her clear ability to take care of herself. This is a Cruise vehicle to be sure, even more so than the Mission: Impossible series, which at least balances his stardom with a team-based approach, and giving him domestic emotional engagement helps soften some of the sharper corners and gives the violence a deeper sense of purpose—he’s fighting for more than abstract ideas like law and justice.

Never Go Back reteams Cruise with director Edward Zwick, who directed him in The Last Samurai (2003). Zwick, who has vacillated his entire career between violent historical epics (1989’s Glory, 1994’s Legends of the Fall, 2008’s Defiance) and intimate character pieces (1986’s About Last Night …, the ’80s television series thirtysomething, 2010’s Love & Other Drugs), is in fairly unfamiliar territory here, but he works it well. He knows that the primary draw is Cruise’s well-honed star wattage, and he lets him do his thing without too much interference. He directs the action scenes well, keeping them lively and full-throttled without giving into trendy aesthetic incoherence. The more character-driven scenes have enough heft that they don’t feel like an afterthought, even though they often double-function to dispense massive amounts of plot information. The screenplay, which Zwick co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Marshall Herskovitz and Richard Wenk, is generally solid, although it sometimes bumbles into illogic (why, for example, would someone like Samantha who is streetwise and smart enough to hold her own on the mean streets of New Orleans questioning junkies in the middle of the night use a credit card to order a pizza when she knows their every move is being watched?). Those missteps aside, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back delivers what it promises, with a healthy dose of good ol’ fashioned action escapism leavened with just enough emotional engagement. It would have been nice if they had found a way to bring back Werner Herzog, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Copyright © 2017 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Paramount Home Entertainment