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Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’ is the Standout of the Season

Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here.

Sophie, I agree that “Shut Up and Dance” was nightmarish—but it certainly left me scratching my head. If the point was simply to dramatize the terrifying grip of online surveillance, there was nothing innovative or surprising about the technology on display. If the grander concept was about internet witch-hunts, or people’s propensity to dispense justice when they only have bits of information at their fingertips, then why were the protagonists seemingly guilty of such heinous crimes? Perhaps Charlie Brooker just wanted to avoid any easy judgments: Even if the main characters of “Shut Up and Dance” were bad people, their treatment was excruciating all the same. That sort of “slippery slope” metaphor can only get me so involved, though I admired the episode’s execution.

It makes sense, however, that perhaps this season’s darkest hour is followed by its most optimistic. “San Junipero” was easily my favorite of this batch of Black Mirror episodes. It may have stood out because its tone was so radically different—this is the one story in which the implications of future technology are somewhat bright, and I was all the more relieved for it. The episode was directed by Owen Smith, who helmed “Be Right Back,” a season-two entry that was similarly pitched with a more low-key, emotional tone.

But unlike that episode, where a woman revived her dead boyfriend by using his social-media history to rebuild his personality inside a synthetic clone, “San Junipero” isn’t a sad ballad of well-meaning tech gone wrong. It’s the story of a different kind of world, one we might eventually arrive at, that will have its own flaws and limits as well as a uniquely powerful purpose. There are a lot of ways Brooker could have approached writing this episode, but his smartest move was to focus on the budding romance between Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) while slowly, but surely, building out the mysterious world of San Junipero around them.

Yorkie is mousy and shy, clad in khaki shorts so dorky they almost loop around to being cool (almost). She goes to San Junipero’s loud, bustling nightclub but mostly hangs out by the arcades, rebuffing any attention, until she meets the very extroverted, very cool, very ‘80s Kelly. There are strange, unexplained touches in the first half of “San Junipero”; Yorkie seems able to quickly change her hairstyle and clothes dramatically when deciding what to go out in (she always settles on those khaki shorts). Kelly always has her eye on the clock, waiting nervously for the midnight hour to strike. And then, when Yorkie searches for Kelly again after they sleep together for the first time, she somehow jumps through different time periods, each marked with appropriate historical and fashion details, to see where she’s gone.

That’s because San Junipero is a virtual world, a massive database in the cloud that people’s consciousness can be uploaded to, guaranteeing virtual immortality to the dead (who make up 80 percent of the population). Yorkie and Kelly are both tourists, allowed only to visit for a few hours every week. In the real world, Yorkie is a paralyzed gay woman who never got to live a real life because of intolerant parents and a tragic accident. Kelly, on the other hand, is an older woman who recently lost her husband; he refused to enter San Junipero, finding the entire concept of virtually cheating death fundamentally inhuman.

It’s the strange paradox of the copy-pasted brain, one that a lot of science-fiction has explored recently

It may sound grim, but this a surprisingly upbeat tale, one that doesn’t make an easy judgment about what any of the characters decide to do with their lives and their afterlives. Yorkie is of course thrilled to enter San Junipero and embark on a new life with Kelly; Kelly is more cautious, worrying that the virtual immortality it grants will eventually hollow out her soul as she endlessly searches for new experiences. It’s the strange paradox of the copy-pasted brain, one that a lot of science-fiction has explored recently (like the wonderful film World of Tomorrow and the terrific video game Soma).

What makes “San Junipero” work, and what makes Yorkie and Kelly’s eventual decision to be together so effective, is its performances. Davis and Mbatha-Raw have such instant, lived-in chemistry, and convey a whole lifetime of angst and desires in just a few interactions. This is the only Black Mirror episode this season that really earns its running time, I think, because it really covers a grand emotional arc in these 60 minutes, rather than padding for time. Did you find “San Junipero” as moving as I, Sophie? And does Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” now have new meaning for you?

Read Sophie Gilbert’s review of the next episode, “Men Against Fire.”

Black Mirror's 'San Junipero' is the Standout of the Season

Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here.

Sophie, I agree that “Shut Up and Dance” was nightmarish—but it certainly left me scratching my head. If the point was simply to dramatize the terrifying grip of online surveillance, there was nothing innovative or surprising about the technology on display. If the grander concept was about internet witch-hunts, or people’s propensity to dispense justice when they only have bits of information at their fingertips, then why were the protagonists seemingly guilty of such heinous crimes? Perhaps Charlie Brooker just wanted to avoid any easy judgments: Even if the main characters of “Shut Up and Dance” were bad people, their treatment was excruciating all the same. That sort of “slippery slope” metaphor can only get me so involved, though I admired the episode’s execution.

It makes sense, however, that perhaps this season’s darkest hour is followed by its most optimistic. “San Junipero” was easily my favorite of this batch of Black Mirror episodes. It may have stood out because its tone was so radically different—this is the one story in which the implications of future technology are somewhat bright, and I was all the more relieved for it. The episode was directed by Owen Smith, who helmed “Be Right Back,” a season-two entry that was similarly pitched with a more low-key, emotional tone.

But unlike that episode, where a woman revived her dead boyfriend by using his social-media history to rebuild his personality inside a synthetic clone, “San Junipero” isn’t a sad ballad of well-meaning tech gone wrong. It’s the story of a different kind of world, one we might eventually arrive at, that will have its own flaws and limits as well as a uniquely powerful purpose. There are a lot of ways Brooker could have approached writing this episode, but his smartest move was to focus on the budding romance between Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) while slowly, but surely, building out the mysterious world of San Junipero around them.

Yorkie is mousy and shy, clad in khaki shorts so dorky they almost loop around to being cool (almost). She goes to San Junipero’s loud, bustling nightclub but mostly hangs out by the arcades, rebuffing any attention, until she meets the very extroverted, very cool, very ‘80s Kelly. There are strange, unexplained touches in the first half of “San Junipero”; Yorkie seems able to quickly change her hairstyle and clothes dramatically when deciding what to go out in (she always settles on those khaki shorts). Kelly always has her eye on the clock, waiting nervously for the midnight hour to strike. And then, when Yorkie searches for Kelly again after they sleep together for the first time, she somehow jumps through different time periods, each marked with appropriate historical and fashion details, to see where she’s gone.

That’s because San Junipero is a virtual world, a massive database in the cloud that people’s consciousness can be uploaded to, guaranteeing virtual immortality to the dead (who make up 80 percent of the population). Yorkie and Kelly are both tourists, allowed only to visit for a few hours every week. In the real world, Yorkie is a paralyzed gay woman who never got to live a real life because of intolerant parents and a tragic accident. Kelly, on the other hand, is an older woman who recently lost her husband; he refused to enter San Junipero, finding the entire concept of virtually cheating death fundamentally inhuman.

It’s the strange paradox of the copy-pasted brain, one that a lot of science-fiction has explored recently

It may sound grim, but this a surprisingly upbeat tale, one that doesn’t make an easy judgment about what any of the characters decide to do with their lives and their afterlives. Yorkie is of course thrilled to enter San Junipero and embark on a new life with Kelly; Kelly is more cautious, worrying that the virtual immortality it grants will eventually hollow out her soul as she endlessly searches for new experiences. It’s the strange paradox of the copy-pasted brain, one that a lot of science-fiction has explored recently (like the wonderful film World of Tomorrow and the terrific video game Soma).

What makes “San Junipero” work, and what makes Yorkie and Kelly’s eventual decision to be together so effective, is its performances. Davis and Mbatha-Raw have such instant, lived-in chemistry, and convey a whole lifetime of angst and desires in just a few interactions. This is the only Black Mirror episode this season that really earns its running time, I think, because it really covers a grand emotional arc in these 60 minutes, rather than padding for time. Did you find “San Junipero” as moving as I, Sophie? And does Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” now have new meaning for you?

Lady Gaga's Joanne Has More Gimmicks Than Guts

“I want your everything as long as it’s free”—right there, in her biggest single, Lady Gaga nailed the eternal tease of pop music. In three easy minutes, you feel immortal, unbeatable, the ultimate person. You stand at the edge, the edge, the edge, but know you won’t tumble over. It was a proposition Gaga tested with ever-more gusto until the safety harness snapped for 2013’s Artpop, where each songs seemed to have six different choruses and 42 layers of synthesizer and zero filter on its lyrics about the insatiable need to feed off of human attention. Suddenly, the listener felt implicated; the rush became lurid; everything was no longer free.

Gaga then retreated into tribute performances and the grounding wisdom of Tony Bennett, resulting finally in her new album Joanne, a self-described return to pop “without makeup.” It used to be that although she was among one of the most famous performers in the world, most people wouldn’t have been able to identify her in plainclothes. Now she sits unadorned on her album cover, with the only controversial fashion choice for the related marketing campaign being a bit of underboob. Decent move, PR-wise, perhaps: Here I am, humbled by my Icarus fall. But musically, she has overcorrected and hired a team with more gimmicks than guts, resulting in a “personal” album that—while often enjoyable—seems like it’s trying to hide its personality.

The once-singular Gaga has played up the image of her as a bandleader this time out, touting the work of the executive producer Mark Ronson—the vinyl-era fetishist of Amy Winehouse and “Uptown Funk” fame—as well as the Top 40 tinkerer BloodPop, the Nashville hitmaker Hillary Lindsey, and the indie rockers Kevin Parker and Josh Homme. “We built our musical family of no rules pop cowboy dance soul funk rock,” Gaga wrote on Instagram, perhaps revealing the label the team gave their group-text.

Sometimes, the album nearly lives up to the gonzo promise of that description. There’s the opener “Diamond Heart,” which begins in Neil Young mode—electric piano, Gaga with a high and delicate drawl—and moves to a tumbling-then-rising chorus from the school of Springsteen. On that song and elsewhere, the grain of her voice is strikingly textured, a pushback in the era of pitch correction. Lead single “Perfect Illusion” remains an effective tribute to cocaine’s effects; its poor chart performance in the face of immense catchiness owes to its bravely abrasive melding of genres. The shimmying “A-YO” will go into immediate rotation at Coyote Ugly. Most tantalizingly, the nonsense chorus of “John Wayne” offers a glimpse into what Joanne could have been had Gaga taken her old robo-Slavic-hedonist shtick to the Wild West. When she screams “go FASTER!” in the song’s intro, it’s one of the album’s few examples of Gaga doing what Gaga got famous for, glorifying the extreme.

The rest of the album is struck in the middle zone, seemingly out of a misguided attempt at communicating maturity. The sturdily crafted ballads “Million Reasons” and “Joanne” might have been exceptional if Gaga the songwriter excelled at the small and specific like Taylor Swift does. But whether eulogizing an aunt she never knew or considering a wrenching breakup, she reaches for generic language—angels gone to heaven, etc.—without offering any twists. If the music cracked open to highlight the mythic scale of her words, that’d be one thing. But it holds back.

Part of the problem lies in Gaga and Ronson’s approach to homage. 1970s singer/songwriters might not be as trendy touchstone as ‘80s synth-pop is right now, but that doesn’t excuse the late-album run of “Sinner’s Prayer,” “Come to Mama,” and “Hey Girl” coasting on swipes from the likes of Johnny Cash, Mama Cass, and Elton John. It’s not that the songs are throwbacks; it’s that they’re the kind of throwbacks whose course you can predict from the first few bars. Ronson has said BloodPop was brought in late in the process to throw some modern touches into the mix, but the extent of his contributions mostly seems to be in fleeting vocal samples that don’t so much enhance the music as timestamp it. The one inspired moment of this section is when “Hey Girl” enters a lovely, woozy bridge as Gaga and Florence Welch duet about a 4 a.m. bonding experience.

The production adorns, rather than supercharges, Gaga’s hooks.

The sense that Gaga’s working with collaborators who don’t quite get her virtues comes through clearest on the masturbation ode “Dancin’ In Circles,” which Ronson has described as “classic Gaga, like ‘Alejandro.’” The song will, indeed, trigger a lot of people to start singing “hot like Mexico, enjoy” over its “La Isla Bonita”-derived beat. But revisit “Alejandro” and you remember the beguiling synth line snaking through the song, tugging listeners along and complementing Gaga’s fantasy. On “Dancin’ In Circles,” meanwhile, the production offers an Art of Noise-y pastiche of sound effects that simply adorn, rather than supercharge, the singer’s hooks.

Even more frustrating is the fate of the album’s closer, “Angel Down,” which reportedly was the first song that Gaga and her longtime producer RedOne presented to Ronson (it’s also the only RedOne credit on Joanne). The bonus tracks for the deluxe version include the song’s demo, and it’s by far the best product of this Gaga era: just piano and guitars as Gaga sings a winding melody with increasing abandon, to the point where she’s screaming the final chorus. On the Ronson/BloodPop version that made the album, though, the song has become strangely mannered, gilded in harps and forfeiting the original’s searing vocals. It’s an odd treatment for lyrics that, Gaga says, were inspired by Trayvon Martin’s death. And it’s a clear demonstration that the stripped-down and personal Gaga could have given a lot more than Joanne does.

The Handmaiden Is a Cinematic Masterpiece

The Handmaiden contains multitudes: It’s a sumptuous romantic period piece, as well as a sexy spy thriller, replete with secret identities and triple-crosses. It’s an extended commentary on Japan’s occupation of Korea in the 1930s, and it’s an intense piece of psychological horror from one of the masters of the genre, Park Chan-wook. But more than anything, The Handmaiden is just pure cinema, a dizzying, disturbing fable of love and betrayal that piles on luxurious imagery, while never losing track of its story’s human core. For Park, the Korean director of crossover genre hits like Old Boy and Thirst, the movie feels like an evolutionary leap forward in an already brilliant career.

The film is, surprisingly enough, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith, a Victorian crime novel about a petty thief who gets entangled in a long con against a noblewoman, with whom she then falls in love (after that, many further twists ensue). Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung have taken Waters’s investigation of Victorian repression and its limits on female empowerment, and translated it into a tale that delves into the dynamics of Korean culture during Japan’s pre-war occupation. This is a movie about the costumes people wear, both literal and psychological, and that focus extends outward to its setting, a peculiar mansion that mashes up Japanese and Victorian architecture. Park’s film is one where every gesture or period detail is loaded with double meaning, and where his heroines have to wrap their feelings in layers of deception just to try and survive.

The plot plays out the same way that Fingersmith does, following a a three-part structure where each successive chapter sheds new light on the last, and a series of three grand cons bound up into a larger, swooning tale of misandry, romance, and liberation. Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri, making her film debut) is a crafty young pickpocket plucked from a den of orphans to be the new handmaiden to a Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee). She’s part of an elaborate scheme cooked up by the conman Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), who plans to marry the emotionally fragile Hideko for her money and then swiftly have her committed. Sook-hee is hired to facilitate his deception, manipulating Hideko into the Count’s arms, but of course, things don’t go exactly as expected.

Hideko is a prisoner in a gilded cage, a manse designed to reflect the culture of Korea’s occupying power, of which she is a prized example. In interviews, Park has said what fascinated him most about transposing Fingersmith to 1930s Korea was the opportunity to comment on the occupation. The chief villain of the piece, Hideko’s uncle-by-marriage, Kozuki, is a Korean intellectual who fetishizes Japanese culture—but he’s also keeping the Japanese Hideko under his thumb as some petty act of supremacy. While he delves into a budding romance between Hideko and Sook-hee, Park burrows into the twisted relationship between the two countries, and the foolishness of the Korean characters gunning for social ascendency by imitating the Japanese way of life.

The Handmaiden is long, occasionally demented, and intense enough that it won’t suit everyone.

The film’s dialogue is subtitled in two colors (Korean in white, Japanese in yellow) to underline the disguises the characters are constantly donning in their efforts to blend in. Park has never been a subtle director, which is why he’s worked so well with more lurid genres (most of his movies fall in the thriller or horror category). With The Handmaiden, he makes use of a smorgasbord of tropes and somehow gets away with it. It’s not every film that can feature astute historical commentary, explicit lesbian sex, prolonged bouts of torture, and a giant foreboding octopus without seeming ridiculous. But in The Handmaiden, each of these elements is as wonderfully surprising as the plot itself, which never lets the viewer guess what’s coming next.

The first part of the film charts Sook-hee’s manipulation of Hideko, a con job that turns into a seduction, and then, a seemingly authentic romance; the power dynamic is clearly tilted against the timid heiress. After 45 minutes, the story is abruptly inverted, then re-told through the eyes of Hideko, revealed as far more self-aware than initially imagined; for its third act, the film upends itself again, each time layering a deeper understanding of its four major characters. You might see each twist coming in isolation, but when they’re all knitted together, the effect is stupefying.

The Handmaiden’s identity shifts as much as its sinuous ensemble; it’s as exciting to watch Park keep his grasp on its changing tone as it is to watch the characters double-cross each other. To say much more would spoil a dazzling climax, but this is at its core a tale of liberation, of costumes being thrown off, and of the delight (and terror) that comes with embracing one’s true self. The Handmaiden is long, occasionally demented, and intense enough that it won’t suit everyone. But it’s moviemaking that demands to be enjoyed, a thrill ride in service something far grander and more important.  

Black Mirror’s ‘Shut Up and Dance’ Is a Horrifying Thriller

Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here.

David, I agree with you that the ending of “Playtest” fell flat. After so many twists (bullies! spiders! spider bullies! Terminator hookups!), the end didn’t evoke pathos so much as a sense of absurdity. In terms of focusing on the evils of technology, though, it seems to me that Black Mirror has always seen technology as something with the potential to enable and encourage human evil, rather than something that’s inherently evil by itself. It takes our worst instincts as people, as societies, and magnifies them.

Hence episodes like “Shut Up and Dance,” seemingly set in the present like “The National Anthem” and “White Bear” and “The Waldo Moment,” all of which imagined scenarios so plausible that two of them have apparently come true. It’s that familiarity that makes them so disturbing, and “Shut Up and Dance” upset me more than any other Black Mirror episode to date. In Mirror-land, the most nightmarish situations seem to occur when all the people involved are devoid of empathy: when Jon Hamm’s character breaks a woman in “White Christmas” by leaving her alone in a white box for six months, or when Victoria Killane in “White Bear” is tortured every day for mass entertainment by being forced to relive a crime she doesn’t remember committing.

“Shut Up and Dance,” for obvious reasons, feels like something of a redux of “White Bear,” but let’s focus on the twist later. Structurally, it was also similar, with a protagonist being plagued by unknown enemies for reasons impossible to discern. In the first scene, an anxious-looking woman is seen leaving a car in an underground garage, looking around nervously, and then fleeing. After that, the episode focuses on Kenny (Alex Lawther), a sweet and shy teenager who works in a restaurant kitchen. After his sister freezes his computer trying to watch illegal movies, Kenny downloads a free malware program called Shrive, which, unbeknownst to him, activates his laptop camera and begins filming him.

In the privacy of his room one night, Kenny goes to his computer and is seen unzipping his trousers and reaching for tissues. Minutes later, he gets an email from an anonymous account, which reads, “WE SAW WHAT YOU DID.” Then another: “REPLY WITH YOUR PHONE NUMBER OR WE POST THE VIDEO TO EVERYONE IN YOUR CONTACTS.” Kenny does, which sparks a series of texts ordering him to fulfill various bizarre tasks: Meet a guy on a rooftop, deliver a cake to a man in a hotel room who’s being similarly manipulated, join forces with that man (Jerome Flynn) to pick up a car, rob a bank, drive to an isolated location in the woods and go alone to a drop-off point, where yet another victim of the unseen overlords is waiting.

“Shut Up and Dance” is written by Brooker and William Bridges, and directed by James Watkins, whose previous work in psychological horror includes the 2007 backpacker thriller Gone and the 2012 supernatural horror The Woman in Black. Watkins does an excellent job maintaining tension throughout the episode, although it lags a bit once Kenny joins up with Jerome Flynn’s Hector. (The interlude in the petrol station where Hector’s PTA-mom friend badgers them into giving her a ride is an unnecessary distraction, but it contains some of Black Mirror’s darkest humor—I also laughed when Hector asked Kenny what kind of cake he was carrying, and Kenny replied, “I dunno, it’s a sponge?”)

Ultimately, though, the episode felt like too much of an endurance test, with no clear message or moment of redemption to take away from it. “White Bear” was basically the same kind of grueling experience, forcing viewers to live through a terrifying escape from gun-wielding masked terrorists and bizarre pedestrian bystanders doing nothing to intervene, then revealing (spoiler) that the woman we’ve sympathized with throughout the whole episode helped commit the horrific murder of a child and is now being punished for it in a perpetual loop. There’s no hope involved, or even a clear moral takeaway. The villain isn’t technology—it’s everyone who’s ever gawked over the details of a grisly crime then had revenge fantasies about how the perpetrator should be punished. It’s all of us.

“Shut Up and Dance” seemed to share the same sense of nihilism, implicating the audience in the final reveal (spoiler very much ahead) that Kenny hadn’t just been watching regular porn on the internet while he was masturbating—he’d been looking at pictures of children. “How young were they?” asks the man in the woods whom he was ordered to “FIGHT TO THE DEATH.” “How young? Yeah. Me too.” After Kenny somehow emerges from the woods, bloodied and shuffling, he gets a phone call from his horrified mother, who’s apparently seen the video Kenny’s been working all day to keep private, along with everyone else he knows. “Kids!,” she cries. “You’ve been looking at kids.”

“Shrive,” the name of the anti-malware program Kenny downloads, is an archaic term that means to either confess your sins to a priest or to be absolved of them.

The reveal throws everything else in the episode into confusion, from the scene in the beginning of the episode where Kenny is nice to a little girl in the restaurant to the sympathy we’ve been encouraged to feel for Kenny throughout his ordeal. Alex Lawther, best-known for playing the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, makes Kenny a totally endearing character through his shyness, his breakdown in the face of what’s happening to him, and his vulnerability, so the question for viewers at the end is, can we still sympathize with him? Should we?

In addition to “White Bear,” this episode reminded me of “Paedogeddon,” an episode of the satirical British fake news show Brass Eye, which you wrote about, David, and which Charlie Brooker co-wrote. “Paedogeddon” lampooned the kind of moral panic and mob fury that’s unleashed whenever the subject of child abuse is up for debate. Brooker seems to be offering up more of the same in “Shut Up and Dance”: a condemnation of those who refuse to empathize with people who have terrible impulses, or who’ve done terrible things.

“Shrive,” the name of the anti-malware program Kenny downloads, is an archaic term that means to either confess your sins to a priest or to be absolved of them. In that sense, the gauntlet Kenny, Hector, and others are forced to run throughout the episode seems to be a kind of punishment for their sins, but at the end, none of them are forgiven. The invisible torturers text them all a troll face and then leak all the blackmail material anyway. The woman from the beginning of the episode is outed for racist comments she made. Hector’s attempts to solicit prostitutes are sent to his wife. In the most punitive and grisly sentence, Kenny and the other viewer of child porn are forced to fight until one of them dies, and then Kenny’s video is released to all his contacts, and he’s arrested for everything he’s done: the pictures, robbing a bank, killing a man. And the overarching mystery of the episode—the question of who exactly is running this horrible show—is as unclear as it ever was.

I didn’t take anything away from this episode other than a sense of doom, and an urge to cover up every camera I own. Brooker’s already made the point that moral panic is a bad thing, and to relish in the degradation of criminals makes us as bad as them. So what was the point of this episode? To understand that good people can have awful urges? To be very afraid of downloading anything? To realize how awful it would be if everyone’s private internet activity was made public? To be horribly depressed? David, what did you make of it? You might have to tell me by letter because I’m fighting the urge to go offline forever.

Black Mirror’s ‘Playtest’ Brings Fear to Life

Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here.

Sophie, I’d call “Nosedive” a solid 3 out of 5—decent premise, nice execution, but just a little half-baked in terms of plot. Black Mirror is a show that excels at simple world-building, and I loved the little details of that episode’s world, the pastels, the cutesy designs, the uniform minimalism that felt inherently obnoxious. (What else would excel in a world of consensus ratings but the aggressively bland?) But Black Mirror also can suffer from its lack of detail, since each episode is focused on one particular quirk of technology, and “Nosedive” felt too repetitive in that regard, drilling into its initial pitch for three-quarters of the episode and finishing the story exactly where you might have guessed.

“Playtest,” the second episode of this season, suffers from some of the same issues, though it’s a much darker hour of television, pitched more as a straightforward piece of psychological horror. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who proved himself quite adept at racking up tension in the film 10 Cloverfield Lane, and written by the show’s creator Charlie Brooker, this was an episode straight out of The Twilight Zone (probably Black Mirror’s closest TV antecedent), tossing twist upon twist at the viewer. For all that, though, it stood out more for its presentation and mood than its actual plotting.

The protagonist in “Playtest” is Cooper (Wyatt Russell), an American crossing the globe on some sort of extended gap year, nervily avoiding phone calls from his mother and hooking up with a tech writer, Sonja (Hannah John-Kamen), while he’s in London. In need of cash, he agrees to take part in an advanced series of tests for an augmented-reality game; for the first half hour of the episode, Brooker keeps the audience on its toes for whatever the shocking rug-pull is going to be. Is Cooper all that he seems? Is Sonja? Is this game company on the level, located in the outskirts of London, and plugging some sort of data-collecting device into Cooper’s brainstem?

The answer is perhaps disappointingly facile—look away, if you want to remain unspoiled. Cooper’s “game” plays out as an unfolding, metatextual horror movie; after some successful early tests, he’s dispatched to a creepy old mansion where he contends with a giant spider, an old school bully, and then a bizarre amalgamation of the two, a CGI spider with a stretched human face that looks, well, horrifying. Then, Cooper is hounded by Sonja, who claims she set him up before turning into a bloody Terminator-style robot; he’s told by the game testers that something has gone horribly wrong and they need to abort the entire program. Finally, there’s a showdown with his mother, revealed to be afflicted with Alzheimer’s, the real demon he’s been avoiding all along.

But it’s all in Cooper’s head—he in fact lasts only a fraction of a second before something in his brain pops because of interference from his cellphone signal. Brooker is obviously winking at the twisty reputation his show has acquired, overloading the episode with so many shocks and surprises before rendering them all meaningless. The technology that undoes Cooper is no more terrifying than signal interference; the lesson learned, if anything, is to listen to people when they tell you to turn your device off. Even if it’s an intentionally simple ending, it feels a little forced, blunting the tragedy of Cooper’s death.

We know these things are going to undo us. It’s just a matter of what form the nightmare is going to take.  

The build-up, though, is quite something. Trachtenberg turns the haunted mansion into a wonderful playground for Cooper’s nightmares. He manages to joke about the conventions of horror cinema (Cooper loudly anticipates every jump scare around every corner) while still having the scares land, and Russell’s performance is equally goofy and sympathetic. When the jokey horror turns into the real thing, he makes the tonal shift feel subtle, and never loses grasp on his cheerful American fish-out-of-water vibe (he’s the son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and certainly feels like Hollywood royalty).

What did you make of “Playtest,” Sophie? Its horrifying imagery (especially that darn man-spider) stuck with me even if its overall message didn’t. In a strange way, this feels part of a whole with the next installment, “Shut Up and Dance,” which also takes a simple premise and carries it through to a scary conclusion. Both are well-executed but feel a little hollow; Black Mirror’s third season surprisingly feels less focused on lecturing the audience of the evils of technology. The future shock, instead, feels almost taken for granted—we know these things are going to undo us somehow. It’s just a matter of what form the nightmare is going to take.  

Read Sophie Gilbert’s review of the next episode, “Shut Up and Dance.”

Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Skewers Social Media

Sophie Gilbert and David Sims will be discussing the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, considering alternate episodes. The reviews contain spoilers; don’t read further than you’ve watched. See all of their coverage here.

Last year, before we were all so exhausted by the degradations of the U.S. presidential race that we no longer had the capacity to feel outrage, a small vortex of scandal swirled around the announcement of a new app called Peeple. Billed as “Yelp for people,” Peeple gave users the capacity to rank any person around them on a star system. “Where once you may have viewed a date or a teacher conference as a private encounter, Peeple transforms it into a radically public performance,” The Washington Post wrote. “Everything you do can be judged, publicized, recorded.”

The judgment from people on Peeple was swift and excoriating, with many commentators being quick to see the dystopian possibilities of an app that grades you as a person without your consent. Peeple’s ambitions were pared back, and it eventually launched without much fanfare earlier this year. But its founding spirit lives on, in most disturbing fashion, in “Nosedive,” the first episode of the new series of Black Mirror. This is apt, of course. In the two years since new episodes of the British anthology show were released, many of the scenarios it imagined have since come to pass, including an obnoxious, priapic TV character who runs for political office on the platform of shaking up a corrupt system; a chatbot that mimics deceased relatives; and (most absurdly) a sex scandal involving the British prime minister and a pig.

Black Mirror, a British speculative anthology series created by Charlie Brooker in 2011, considers the murky relationship between humans and technology, the latter of which often threatens to progress so quickly that our ethical frameworks don’t have the chance to catch up. Brooker has said that the show’s name refers to “the cold, shiny screens” of the devices we’re so attached to, but it also seems to offer a message that technology reflects the darkest elements of humanity right back at us. Some episodes are set in vividly imaginative future worlds; the most disturbing ones, though, are set in the present, and shine an uncomfortable spotlight on the ways in which we’re already living.

In that sense, “Nosedive” is both dystopian fiction and acute social satire. Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) lives in a version of America where every tiny interaction is ranked by the people involved on an app that syncs with augmented-reality contact lenses (or retinal implants, it’s unclear). The minute you see someone you can also see their ranking, meaning that reality has morphed into a pastel-colored nightmare of aggressive cheeriness, as citizens attempt to out-nice each other and bump up their ratings.

The episode, written by Brooker with Michael Schur (the writer/producer behind Parks and Rec and Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and the actress Rashida Jones, aims squarely at the anxiety stoked by a modern obsession with quantification. For anyone who’s ever made conversation with an Uber driver specifically to upgrade a passenger rating, or wondered why a tweet isn’t getting more likes, or even checked a credit score, “Nosedive” surely radiates shivers of anxiety. Directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice), it’s set in a Truman Show-style universe that seems designed explicitly for Instagram. Men and women wear perfectly mismatched shades of salmon and teal, flowering plants creep over every surface, and even the cookies have smiley faces on them.

Lacie, whose average rating is a solid but not spectacular 4.2/4.3, spends almost all of her time practicing happy faces in the mirror, composing adorable photos for her timeline, and brandishing goodwill at people in the service industry, rating them five stars and then visibly crumpling in relief when they rate her back. When she goes to check out her fiendishly expensive dream home, a realtor informs her that there’s a program that takes 20 percent off the rent if she can get her rating above a 4.5. Then, out of nowhere, an old friend from middle school who’s become a social-media star (Alice Eve) asks Lacie to be the maid of honor at her upcoming wedding, teasing the fact that there will be dozens of “prime influencers” there who can rate her speech and boost her ranking.

The title of the episode is a conclusive giveaway that all doesn’t go according to plan. Lacie’s brother (James Norton), a snarky kid who hates how fake she’s become, gives her 1 star after an argument, as does a cab driver whom she keeps waiting. When her rating drops below 4.2, and her flight to the wedding is canceled, an airline representative can no longer book her on another flight because her number is too low. It’s at this point that “Nosedive” truly descends into nightmarish territory, but it does so without scares, or psychological horror. Rather, it’s the recognizable parts of Lacie’s story that sting: feeling excluded, feeling disliked, feeling downgraded and categorized as a second-class citizen.

As with so many Black Mirror episodes, the horror lies in imagining all too clearly how such a situation might feel.

The lush, calming visuals of “Nosedive” clash nicely with the mounting anxiety, and Howard’s performance is terrific—she conveys Lacie’s inner frustration while grinning cheerfully through it. But the episode loses some of its power once Lacie’s slide begins. For one thing, it’s about 15 minutes too long, which sets an ominous precedent for the rest of the season. When it first aired on U.K. television Black Mirror’s episodes were around 42 minutes, but in season three they tend to run around an hour. David, you’ve written about Netflix’s pacing problems, and “Nosedive” seemed like a distinct case of something that could have used an editor to sharpen it up. Once the world building is established in the first half of the episode, the pace becomes ponderous; in the second half, in which Lacie suffers humiliation after humiliation, it’s almost torturous to watch.

The idea that a society where everyone is forced to be pleasant and agreeable all the time becomes a nightmare underpins Lois Lowry’s The Giver, where “sameness” gets rid of emotional and physical pain but also eradicates individualism and free will. So the parts of “Nosedive” where Lacie learns to embrace being honest (thanks to the assistance of a grizzled truck driver ex machina played by Cherry Jones) felt far more predictable than the scenes that imagine how future societies could punish people simply for being unpleasant. Lacie’s coworker, blacklisted by colleagues after a breakup, can’t physically enter his office after his rating drops below 3.5. After screaming at an airline employee and using profanity, Lacie gets a whole point docked from her score and is put on “double damage,” where any negative ratings she gets are magnified. As with so many Black Mirror episodes, the horror lies in imagining all too clearly how such a situation might feel.

The ending, which sees Lacie robbed of her phone and arrested, trading insults happily with a fellow prisoner across the hall, felt too cute to me, although it was more of an optimistic conclusion than Black Mirror usually delivers. But I loved the visuals of “Nosedive,” and the jarring sense of hyperreality, and Howard’s performance. David, how did it rate compared to “Playtest”? More importantly, how many stars would you give it?

Read David Sims’s review of the next episode, “Playtest.”

'Nasty': A Feminist History

After Donald Trump referred to Hillary Clinton, during Wednesday’s final presidential debate, as “a nasty woman,” many of Clinton’s fellow ladies took it upon themselves to make an announcement: They were nasty, too. Just as nasty—maybe even more nasty—than the woman Trump had attempted to denigrate, via a weaponized mutter, before a live audience of millions of people.

Soon, the hashtags #nastywomen and #IAmANastyWoman trended on Twitter. The website nastywomengetshitdone.com got passed around, mostly by people delighted by the fact that the URL, via some hasty behind-the-scenes maneuvering, now leads to Hillary Clinton’s campaign website. The Huffington Post asked its readers, with only a trace of irony, “Are you a nasty woman? Let us know.”

Women have been letting them know—but their declarations have been addressed, for the most part, not to The Huffington Post, but to, well, everyone. “Nasty,” last night, was reclaimed and re-litigated and badge-of-honored, via tweets like this:

nasty woman starter kit pic.twitter.com/CRQqAxSaQP

— Alex Laughlin (@alexlaughs) October 20, 2016

And like this:

When they go low we get NASTY! pic.twitter.com/z9rAZYH0V2

— Courtney Enlow (@courtenlow) October 20, 2016

The hasty embrace of nastiness is just one more instance of Trumpian low-going met with an attempt among the public to find higher ground. It was also, however, more evidence of the internet-diffused feminism that has come in response to the sticky parfait of misogynies that Trump has served up throughout this campaign. “Nasty,” as (m)uttered by Trump, wasn’t just an all-purpose insult, the negative version of “tremendous” or “very great” or “yuge.” It was highly gendered—so much so that “nasty woman” read, coming from Trump, as redundant. He had no need to clarify: Calling Clinton “nasty” is just one more way that Trump has attempted to use his opponent’s gender against her.

And, as Clinton has been saying on the campaign trail, women understood exactly what he was trying to do.

The exact origins of “nasty” are unclear; the word might be related, the OED speculates, to nestig—“foul” or “dirty” in Middle Dutch, and possibly connected to the messiness of a bird’s nest. “Nasty” might also be rooted in the Old French nastre, meaning “miserly, envious, malicious, spiteful”—a word that has itself been shortened from villenastre, connected to “villain,” and meaning “infamous” or more generally “bad.”   

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What is evident, though, is that “nasty,” for hundreds of years, has neatly combined the notion of physical dirtiness with filth of a more moral strain. Hamlet, via Shakespeare, used the word to combine sex with that infamously dirty animal, the pig: “Nay, but to live/ In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,/ Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love/ Over the nasty sty.” Since the 1630s, “nasty” has also been used to describe bad weather, which affects both one’s physical being and one’s psychic outlook. Since the early 1700s, it’s been used to describe generally unpleasant things. And, as an insult to women, in particular, “it dates back to colonial times,” Caroline Light, a gender studies professor at Harvard University, told the Washington Post. “A ‘nasty’ woman is one who refuses to remain in her proper place, as defined by men. One who challenges male authority.”

In the 20th century, though, “nasty” took on another connotation, one that took it back to its possibly animalistic origins: “Nasty” came to be explicitly associated with sex. Not just with sex itself, though; with the particular kind of sexual adventurousness that can run afoul of Puritanical social standards. (“Cuz a this here’s another nasty song,” L’il Ru sang, “I love the way she freak with no panties on now I say.”) And with that sense came the rise of “so nasty” jokes, and “your mom is so nasty” jokes, and … yes. Even Destiny’s Child, whose members are today so deeply associated with the feminine fierce, endorsed the idea of nastiness’s shortcomings: “You’s a nasty (nasty) Trashy (nasty) Sleazy (nasty) Classless (nasty),” they sang, in “Nasty Girl”:

Shakin’ that thang on that man, lookin’ all stank and nasty

Swore you look cute girl in them dukes, booty all out lookin’ trashy

Sleazy put some clothes on, I told ya

Don’t walk out ya heezy without clothes on, I told ya

You nasty girl, you nasty, you trashy

In that sense, “nasty” for a long time functioned in exactly the way Trump seemed to want it to on Wednesday—as an efficient insult that impugns women prismatically. In referring to Clinton as “a nasty woman,” Trump was insulting her as both a physical and a moral entity: He was denigrating her looks, her personality, and her moral character. He was suggesting ugliness, and ickiness, and lasciviousness. He was replicating, essentially, the regressive assumptions that are still rampant in a culture that still demands that women be, above all, pleasing.

Trump was trying to replicate the regressive assumptions of a culture that demands that women be, above all, pleasing.

What he missed, though, was the recent change that “nasty” has undergone. It’s an ugly word, perhaps—it requires the mouth of its utterer to catch and gape and hiss—but it is also, now, a hopeful one. When women, after Wednesday’s debate, attested to their own nastiness, they were echoing a reclaiming of the word that has already been taking place in pop culture.

Take Janet Jackson’s 1986 hit “Nasty Boys,” which went, in part,

Nasty Nasty boys, don’t mean a thing, huh

Oh you nasty boys

Nasty Nasty boys, don’t ever change, huh

Oh you nasty boys!

And which continued,

Hey!

Who’s that thinkin’ nasty thoughts? (Nasty boys!)

Who’s that in that nasty car? (Nasty boys!)

Who’s that eating that nasty food? (Nasty boys!)

Who’s jamming to my nasty groove? (Nasty boys!)

Jackson’s iconic lyrics would also be echoed by Britney Spears, whose 2001 song “Boys” built up to the chorus,

Boys!

Sometimes a girl just needs one (I get nasty)

Boys!

To love her and to hold (I get nasty)

Boys!

And when a girl is with one (I get nasty)

Boys!

Then she’s in control! (You like that? Here we go..)

Then she’s in control. Yes. Long before nastywomengetshitdone.com came along, women have been taking the dual senses of “nastiness”—physical foulness and moral—and reclaiming both of them. And they’ve been doing so on specifically feminist terms. In the songs that served as the unofficial anthems of the final presidential debate of this hard-fought campaign, it’s women who are in control: of their own bodies, of their own desires, of their own futures. In Jackson’s framing, it’s the boys who are “nasty”; it’s the women who are, as it were, going high. Who’s jamming to my nasty groove? she asks. And then she answers her own question: Nasty boys!

It seems appropriate that Jackson has explained “Nasty” not just in terms of power, but in terms of power that arises in response to attempts to take it away. “The danger hit home when a couple of guys started stalking me on the street,” she explained, in a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone. “They were emotionally abusive. Sexually threatening.”

She continued:

Instead of running to Jimmy or Terry for protection, I took a stand. I backed them down. That’s how songs like “Nasty” and “What Have You Done for Me Lately” were born, out of a sense of self-defense. Control meant not only taking care of myself but living in a much less protected world. And doing that meant growing a tough skin. Getting attitude.

Getting attitude: As Wednesday’s debate suggested, there’s nothing, at this point, nastier than that.

Clinton Still Hasn't Faced Questions About Pay-to-Play Head On

Hillary Clinton has gotten very lucky in the 2016 presidential election, on few items as clearly as the Clinton Foundation. And her spell of good luck continued again Wednesday night at the third presidential debate.

Moderator Chris Wallace pointed out that Clinton had pledged to avoid appearances of conflict of interest between the Clinton Foundation and her work as secretary of state. “But emails show that donors got special access to you. Those seeking grants for Haiti relief were considered separately from non-donors, and some of those donors got contracts, government contracts, taxpayer money,” Wallace said. “Can you really say that you kept your pledge to that Senate committee? And why isn’t what happened and what went on between you and the Clinton Foundation, why isn’t it what Mr. Trump calls pay-to-play?”

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Clinton more or less avoided the question. She said that “everything I did as secretary of state was in furtherance of our country’s interests and our values. The State Department has said that.” Then she moved into a defense of the Clinton Foundation’s work. Wallace tried to get her back to the question at hand: “The specific question went to pay for play. Do you want to talk about that?” Clinton, for the most part, did not, saying “there’s no evidence.”

That gave Trump a chance to weigh in. “It’s a criminal enterprise, and so many people know it,” he said. He demanded that the Clinton Foundation return donations from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, based on those countries’ records on women’s rights and gay rights, then attacked the Clinton Foundation’s work in Haiti. Clinton happily defended the foundation’s work in Haiti, then turned to mocking Trump’s own, beleaguered foundation.

It was a happy escape for Clinton. First, she dodged Wallace’s question. Then, Trump effectively let her off the hook. Even though he has floated the “pay-to-play” accusation, he instead changed the focus. Neither of his alternative attacks makes much sense. Trump’s efforts to present himself as a champion of women’s rights fall on his record of sexist comments and the raft of sexual-assault accusations against him.

The Haiti attack may win Trump some backing among conservative members of the Haitian diaspora, though it’s not his most forceful argument for the American electorate overall. Moreover, it is, as Jonathan Katz has detailed, misleading: While there are good critiques to be made of the Haitian reconstruction, they don’t involve the Clintons treating the effort as a personal ATM.

The pay-to-play allegations seem far closer to the mark. In early 2015, it looked like they could play a major role in the campaign. The book Clinton Cash, for example, showed a case where a donor to the Clinton Foundation, and friend of Bill Clinton’s, received crucial approval for a deal from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. No report has provided evidence of a tit-for-that in that case.

Once Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, her husband’s speaking fees increased. In some cases, his fees went to the former president as earned income; in other cases, it went to the foundation. It has not been made clear how the destination was determined, again creating a foggy minefield of potential conflicts of interest.

The Clinton Foundation also foreswore donations from foreign governments at the start of her term in Foggy Bottom. But while it appears the foundation followed the letter of that law, the spirit didn’t fare so well. Individuals close to foreign regimes gave generously.

Then there have been the messages that popped up in Clinton’s State Department emails. In multiple cases, Clinton Foundation official Doug Band had a back channel to the secretary’s aides, and particularly Huma Abedin, who also worked for his consultancy, Teneo. Band inquired about jobs for people and attempted to connect a wealthy Clinton Foundation donor from Lebanon with a State Department Lebanon hand to talk about elections in that country. (Other accusations, such as suggestions that Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus bought State Department access, make little sense.)

Clinton’s campaign has defended her against these charges by pointing out that there is no evidence of quid pro quos. The donor, Gilbert Chagoury, says he only wanted to provide advice, and he apparently never actually spoke with anyone at State. While that is true, it is also to a certain degree beside the point.

Conflicts of interest are as much about appearance as they are about concrete examples of malfeasance. The point of ethics guidelines is to avoid even the impression that there might be shady business, and in the case of the Clinton Foundation, that did not work. Even if donors to the Clinton Foundation were not getting access from the State Department, it’s easy to imagine some giving was inspired by the hope of access. And even if there were no concrete favors doled out, the Band messages suggest some access.

Trump’s failure to press his advantage politically, and Clinton’s success in dodging the question, make for interesting debate analysis. But if, as polls suggest, Clinton wins the presidency, the question will become more important. The Clinton Foundation reportedly plans to stop accepting foreign and corporate donations if Hillary Clinton is elected, and to discontinue the annual Clinton Global Initiative events. Bill Clinton would step down from the foundation, but Chelsea Clinton, their daughter, would apparently remain on the board.

In other words, there would remain many close links between the president of the United States and the Clinton Foundation, creating more space for accusations of conflict of interest and of pay-to-play. Clinton may have escaped the question on Wednesday, but it won’t go away if she wins.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back Isn't Weird Enough

Jack Reacher is a figure of almost zen-like calm—or he would be, if he ever stopped breaking people’s limbs so cavalierly. As played by Tom Cruise, the ex-military cop is somehow short and gigantic all at once, an oblong hulk who hitchhikes from town to town dispensing justice. The first entry in the Jack Reacher film series—based on a series of books by Lee Child—was a brutish delight, a grim potboiler that seemed conjured from an earlier era of Hollywood. But its new sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, is dispiritingly formulaic, retaining much of the first film’s swaggering masculinity, but none of its self-awareness.

It’s too bad, because the Jack Reacher series has given Cruise a perfect avatar for this late, strange, action-hero era in his career. Devoid of the boyish charm that propelled the actor to stardom in the ’80s and ’90s, Reacher is a vengeful alien walking among foolish mortals, a detached, but nonetheless oddly compelling ex-soldier who barks lines like, “I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot.” Cruise is terrific in Never Go Back, seeming more comfortable than ever as a man who struggles to personally relate to anyone unless he’s trying to snap their neck, but the film doesn’t come close to matching his bizarre intensity.

Directed by Edward Zwick (who worked with Cruise on The Last Samurai and is slumming from his usual prestige-picture territory), Never Go Back is adapted from the 18th book in Child’s never-ending series, and this choice of source material has its flaws. The film assumes an easy familiarity with its character that many viewers may not have, as Reacher navigates the world of the U.S. Military Police, of which he is a former member, and uncovers a gun-running conspiracy.

In 2012, Jack Reacher was a moderate hit that stood out for its weird flourishes, like casting Werner Herzog as the chief villain. The movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, gave its action sequences a unique visual snap—its opening, shown entirely through the lens of a sniper rifle, is one of the most bravura pieces of Hollywood action filmmaking in the last decade. McQuarrie then re-united with Cruise for the fifth Mission Impossible entry, Rogue Nation, where the two played with more elaborate set-pieces. Zwick, as a replacement, lacks McQuarrie’s panache. The fights are mostly blurry and dark, and the final showdown, which takes place on the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, resorts to every possible cliché rather than using that chaotic environment to its advantage.

There’s an ineffable weirdness at the core of Jack Reacher that a smart director can explore and exploit.

Reacher is introduced with the same hushed reverence as in the previous film. Threatened with arrest by a local sheriff after getting into a fight at a diner, Reacher intones that soon the sheriff will be the one in handcuffs, pointing to a near payphone. It immediately rings with the news: Reacher is right, and the sheriff is going to jail, suddenly exposed as a human trafficker. This is the kind of magician Reacher is; he’s like a grim version of the Fonz, down to his propensity for leather jackets. When he walks into a room, people say, “We’ve been waiting for you to arrive.” When he wants to threaten someone inside a car, he punches through the window with ease, sustaining only a grazed knuckle in the process.

The idea of Reacher is that he can behave as the law cannot, unbound by inconvenient restrictions like due process or one’s right to a jury trial. Reacher conjures his own justice from thin air, killing the bad guys, protecting the innocent, and then slinking to the next town with just a few dollars in his pocket. The plot of Never Go Back revolves around a fellow military cop named Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), who has been framed for espionage. Reacher breaks her out, and the rest of the film is a mostly uninterrupted chase around Washington D.C. and New Orleans that pauses only to delve into a subplot about a 15-year-old girl (Danika Yarosh) who might be Reacher’s daughter.

There’s no real chemistry between Cruise and Smulders, but the film almost plays that to its advantage, spinning their relationship as one of mutual respect. Never Go Back mines most of its laughs from its protagonist’s strange social awkwardness; he’s no James Bond, as suave in a formal setting as he is deadly in combat. Cruise constantly sniffs and grimaces when interacting with people, and is at his calmest when committing base violence. It’s an unusual, involving performance, perhaps even better than his (excellent) work in the first Reacher, but it’s mostly wasted on a film committed to formula. It’s unsurprising that Zwick, who is far less interested in action, leans on the human story between Reacher and his maybe-daughter Samantha to propel the film, but it’s by far the movie’s weakest, most perfunctory element.

Jack Reacher is a series that Tom Cruise can grow old with. There’s nothing stopping the now 54-year-old actor from growing more grizzled and anti-social with every sequel, if he wants to make them. Even a phoned-in Reacher will play well on cable years from now: Never Go Back is certainly still watchable despite its terrible villain (an assassin called “The Hunter,” played by Patrick Heusinger) and a predictable plot. But there’s an ineffable weirdness at the core of the central character that a smart director (like Zwick) can explore and exploit. After this mediocre entry, Jack Reacher may never come back to theaters, but there’s life in this old dog yet.