The writer and director seem as though they really want this movie to have a little heart, and so play up the absentee father angle as much as they can. I don’t think anyone buys it as anything but a device to fill time. Action set pieces are strung together by John and Jack talking about how he was never there for his son, the demands of being a policeman, blah blah blah. It’s distracting early on because all John seems to care about, despite things exploding all around him, is that his son forgives him and they patch things up. Never mind that there are criminals all around doing something or other, probably bad stuff.
Then it all gets resolved in like ten seconds, with John telling—I want to say the prisoner guy but I honestly have no recollection of who he was talking to or whether it matters—telling him that he feels bad for not being there for Jack. Something along those lines. Jack conveniently overhears this and in a fine moment of ack-ting all of a sudden he realizes that his father feels bad for not being there for him because that’s what he just said, obvs. The last movie, by contrast, had awesome moments of Kevin Smith and Bruce Willis yelling at each other. At least that was fun to listen to.
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