I never saw Jack Reacher, but evidently foreign audiences were into watching Tom Cruise play author Lee Child’s ultimate ex-military badass. Or maybe they just liked seeing Werner Herzog play a dude who chewed his own fingers off. Man, I gotta see Jack Reacher.
But before I do that, I have to tell you that the trailer for the sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, is here. Watch below!
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First off, let’s just acknowledge how nice it is to see a young action franchise that isn’t looking to make grossly mega-budgeted summer blockbusters. That’s healthy. It’ll add a nice touch of variety to cinemas when Jack Reacher: Never Go Back comes out on October 21, later this year.
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how silly this looks. That corrupt sheriff’s name tag reads “Raymond Wood”, but it might as well say “Rosco P. Coltrane”. The first Jack Reacher, from what I know, has a strong sense of humor. Christopher McQuarrie (writer and director of Jack Reacher) also wrote and directed Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which had great moments of self-aware levity.
Sure, there are comedic moments in this trailer (that haircut joke is a real knee-slapper), but McQuarrie’s light and precise sense of humor doesn’t really come across here. Perhaps that’s because McQuarrie neither wrote nor directed Never Go Back, or perhaps it’s because a trailer is only two and a half minutes of compiled footage pulled out of a feature-length film.
Also notably missing from this trailer is the killer cast the first film had. Rosamund Pike, David Oyelowo, Richard Jenkins, Werner Herzog… all gone. Now, perhaps none of those characters are actually in Lee Child’s Never Go Back (the novel upon which this sequel is based). Maybe all of ’em died in the last movie. Whatever the case may be, I don’t see a whole lot of recognizable faces aside from Tom Cruise and Cobie Smulders.
Never Go Back is directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai) and adapted from Lee Child’s novel by Marshall Herskovitz. It looks like all of us that missed out on Jack Reacher have until October 21 to get caught up.