Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher should have taken his own advice and “never gone back” down this well-trodden path.

As far as bucks-for-bangs goes, 13 Hours doesn’t disappoint.

It should have been an effortless performance for a man who has made that word entirely his own in film after film, including a couple directed by himself. Where from then this laborious effort and this creaking film, despite the little-known jewel of a story from the greatest war the planet has seen? The actor-director and co-screenwriter drowns it in not only very cliched characterisations but in very strange and half-hearted flippancy contrasted with amazingly soporific speeches.