Jack Reacher Goes From Real To PC Extreme
The first Jack Reacher seemed low budget, and yet it stood out as different and better than just about everything else coming out of Hollywood, in part, because it lacked all that PC propaganda that permeates everything else out of Hollywood. I was wondering the whole time how such a movie was allowed to have been made in the first place. Then, Jack Reacher 2 spent more money to go to the other extreme … almost as if it were apologizing for the first.
Both movies follow the same formula: A female attorney is in over her head but doesn’t know it, and Jack Reacher comes out of nowhere to save her. After fighting all of the lower level bad guys, he must then fight the one bad guy who is as much of a badass as he is. Otherwise, the two movies couldn’t be more different.
You know from the beginning that Jack Reacher 2 is a typical movie because he has just beaten up a bunch of rural white cops who were taking advantage of illegal aliens. Then the good federal police come and arrest the bad local police. Then you immediately realize that the opening scene was irrelevant to the rest of the movie and had only one purpose—virtue signaling.
In Jack Reacher 2, all the bad guys are white, and all the white guys are bad. All of the bad guys are guys too (all of the women are good). They even made Jack Reacher himself less likeable by implying that he was more of a typical asshole white guy in the past. They even lead you to believe throughout most of the movie that he is, or could be, a deadbeat dad.
In the first movie, there was just the one female character, and she was a believable female attorney. She had ordinary intelligence and competence for her job, which she got because she worked for her dad. She didn’t even fight—at all! The only thing that was slightly unbelievable about her was that she was entirely honest and not at all corrupt. Whereas, her dad was the kind of corrupt government official you would expect in his job. In fact, the one PC element in the first movie was that you were led to believe throughout most of the movie that it was her dad trying to have her killed.
In the second movie, the female attorney (who works behind a desk) is more of a badass than every man in the movie except for Jack Reacher and his nemesis. She is also the kind of princess who is always ready to fly into a rage if she suspects that some man might not be treating her … like a man. In order to not outshine her too much, they even take away some of Jack’s abilities from the first movie. For example, they don’t show us his photographic memory or his world class sniper skills.
The first movie has male bonding; whereas, the second movie replaces the male bonding with a fantasy level of female bonding and “women helping women”.
To understand the main message of Jack Reacher 2, it is also necessary to know that the one white guy who isn’t necessarily bad in this movie is letting bad things happen because he is incompetent because he is old and “tired”. Also, Jack Reacher is tolerable for a white guy because he stays apart from the rest of society and only appears when necessary to help women and minorities, and then he segregates himself again. The main message of Jack Reacher 2 is clear: White men are irredeemable and shouldn’t even be allowed in society.
Although it is interesting to see a sequel try so hard to be the opposite of the original, what really interests me is: 1) who would create something like Jack Reacher 2 (and why), 2) who would want to watch something like Jack Reacher 2 (and why), 3) why is Jack Reacher 2 the norm for what comes out of Hollywood, and 4) why was a movie as in touch with reality as the first Jack Reacher allowed to come out of Hollywood in the first place?
