Tom Cruise back as American Ronin Jack Reacher

CEBU, Philippines - Tom Cruise returns as lone-wolf hero Jack Reacher with his particular brand of justice in Paramount Pictures’ highly anticipated, action-packed sequel “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.”

The film follows Reacher as he races to uncover the truth about active duty soldiers, once under his command, who are being killed. It is based upon “Never Go Back,” Lee Child’s 18th novel in the best-selling Jack Reacher series that has seen 100 million books sold worldwide.

The film reunites Cruise with director and co-writer Edward Zwick who previously worked with the actor in 2003’s award-winning “The Last Samurai.”

“I immediately connected with this story and this character,” says Zwick. “Jack Reacher is an archetypal American hero and a modern day ronin: he’s traded a life of rules and structure to live this nomadic life, free of emotional attachments and responsibilities.”

“I was excited when Ed said yes to the project,” says Cruise. “Ed and I have been looking for something to do together ever since ‘The Last Samurai.’ I have such admiration for Ed as a writer and a filmmaker. You look at his movies; he fully immerses you in a time and a place. That is what I love about movies: feeling the texture of the characters and the environment that they’re in that Ed captures so well.”

“‘Never Go Back’ is unique in that it’s not primarily a stunt movie; it’s a character piece,” muses Cruise. “Even so, Reacher as a character has his own very unique brutality.”

To bring this very ‘unique brutality’ to the screen, Zwick and Cruise enlisted “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation” stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood.

When it came to designing the action for this film, Eastwood reveals, “It starts with the director. Ed has a vision and he gave me a sort of scope to work in. I try to find ways to build tension, and most importantly, keep it within the story.”

“Wade is a storyteller,” commends Zwick. “When you sit down to write a fight scene, you can visualize the beats, but it’s a whole different experience when you’re on set. Wade and Tom are so experienced and they know exactly what they’re capable of, what they’ve done before, and what movement they’d like to try. You write these scenes with bodies in space. Like any scene, there’s a beginning, middle and end, but instead of telling your story in words and dialogue, you’re telling your story in movement, punches and counterpunches.”

Though “Never Go Back” boasts the same stunt coordinator and star as the “Mission Impossible” series, Zwick makes a clear delineation. “Jack Reacher is less charismatic and much more direct than Ethan Hunt, and our stunts reflect that. There’s a showiness inherent to the spy genre that’s absent here. What we’re going for owes a bit more to character-based crime stories of the ‘70s, like ‘Bullet’ and ‘The French Connection.’ Tom’s doing some very difficult stunts. He’s jumping from a car to a rooftop, climbing a drain pipe and driving a car that goes down steps, but everything is within the realm of physics.”

“The most boring job on set is Tom’s stunt double,” adds Zwick. “Tom loves to be involved of every aspect of this production.”

“For me, filmmaking is all about collaboration,” Cruise adds. “If we’re all working towards the common goal of making the absolute best movie we can, that in itself is valuable. If the people I work with have a good experience, I’ll probably get to work with them again. Same goes for audiences. When we make a great movie that the audience connects with, we get to make another one. I hope people love this movie, because we loved making it.”

In the film, years after resigning command of an elite military police unit, the nomadic, righter-of-wrongs Reacher is drawn back into the life he left behind when his friend and successor, Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) is framed for espionage. Reacher will stop at nothing to prove her innocence and to expose the real perpetrators behind the killings of his former soldiers.

Since 1997, readers have been riveted by the exploits of Jack Reacher, who first appeared in the pages of author Lee Child’s “Killing Floor” and continued on in a series now spanning 20 novels.

Producer Don Granger brought the hit series to Cruise’s attention, which led to Cruise starring and producing 2012’s “Jack Reacher,” an adaptation of Child’s ninth Reacher novel “One Shot” that went on to gross over $200 million in worldwide box office.

After the success of “Jack Reacher,” producers immediately started developing the next film, basing it on “Never Go Back,” a more recent book in the series.

“The great thing about the Jack Reacher novels is that they’re not chronological,” Granger explains. “There’s not a lot of continuity that you need to be familiar with to enjoy the story. With the exception of Reacher and his toothbrush, there are very few characters that carry over from book to book.”

Child describes the lasting appeal of his character: “Reacher is a modern iteration of the mysterious stranger. The American paradigm is the Western, where a mysterious rider comes in off the range, sorts out the problem, and rides off into the sunset, but this character is universal. Medieval Europe had the knight-errant, and feudal Japan had the ronin – banished knights forced to wander the land, doing good deeds.”

“There’s a wish fulfillment in a character like Reacher,” says co-writer Marshall Herskovitz. “We all want to be somebody who’s going to stand up to the bad guys, and Reacher is this one-man retaliatory force for justice. He’s on his own and he doesn’t take crap from anybody.”

Paramount Pictures and IMAX Corporation digitally re-mastered “Never Go Back” into the immersive IMAX format with the film now showing in IMAX theaters as well as in regular cinemas in the Philippines. (FREEMAN)