Reacher is an American action crime streaming television series developed by Nick Santora for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the Jack Reacher book series by Lee Child, it stars Alan Ritchson as the title character, a former U.S. Army Military Police Major with extensive investigative and combat experience who now lives as a drifter, traveling from town to town across the United States and getting into trouble. The Amazon Prime show does one thing brilliantly and that is the casting of Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise does a lot of things well but for a character of immense physicality like Reacher, Cruise’s 5’7 lean frame just doesn’t make the audience feel the imposing presence that Ritchson’s 6’3 frame does. Considering the Reacher of the book, stands at 6’5 and 250 lbs, there was no way Tom Cruise could have pulled it off in the movies.
The Amazon show is a hit with audiences as it keeps it simple and connects with Lee Child’s hero. Ritchson’s version of the character is true to the character from the book, fulfilling his hook from all along: he’s the biggest guy in any room and by the looks of it also the smartest, when you normally get one or the other. In Season 1, he wanders through a town in Georgia where he gets embroiled in a murder investigation. The show hits you with a lot of questions immediately, like the mystery of this special military police investigator with a list of war medals, suddenly rolling into the quiet town of Margrave, Georgia at the same time a body been found shot, its limbs broken, and covered with a cardboard box. Many bodies will pile up, a police station and a mayoral system will be turned upside down, and the encyclopedia in Reacher’s brain will keep flipping back to some clue about animal feed. We later discover that Reacher has a family connection to the body that was found and we are also taken through snapshots of Reacher’s childhood.
What makes this form of Reacher so much fun is seeing an Arnold Schwarzenegger-size action figure use his head so much—including the way that Ritchson’s Reacher headbutts people as if his forehead was a concrete block (which is pretty cool and his screen presence, makes it believable too). The prison shower fight gives Reacher a bone-breaking introduction as a heavyweight fighter who is not interested in finesse. His punches hit like speeding trucks, and the camera often lets us see him take down numerous opponents at the same time, with brutal efficiency. The action in general hints at how much care Amazon is putting into the show, by giving creative space for standout fight choreography.
Season 1 gives us Willa Fitzgerald as Roscoe, who also plays her part very well, another cop suspicious of Reacher, who later enters into a romantic relationship with him although the show does try it’s best to convince us that she is a bad-ass even without him. Reacher also gets support in the form of police chief Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin), a Harvard-educated, tweed suit-wearing, Black man from Boston who encounters racism in the predominantly white town he wants to protect. His “delicate” approach is the exact opposite of Reacher although in this show, it works very well striking a balancing act.
Season 2 kicks off with Reacher’s old squad – the Special Investigators – dying like flies dropped from a helicopter (with their wings clipped obviously otherwise flies don’t die that way). We are introduced to a new love interest and we see Alan Ritchson even bigger than in Season 1, which I wouldn’t have believed but considering he admitted to steroid usage, makes sense. We are also introduced to some of the other special investigators who have their own special “set” of skills. Season 2 has had only 4 episodes so far, so I can’t talk much about this season yet but what I have seen has been fast-paced, exciting and engaging just like Season 1.
If given a chance, I can see Reacher become a 3-5 season gem. The show doesn’t waste time in unnecessary wokery and it does not shy from old-school masculinity which has been diluted these days due to some folks moaning about a made-up term called “toxic masculinity” just because they took a Gillette advertisement too seriously. Jack Reacher entertains and entertains hard. It combines the fun of investigating murders and conspiracies with the devastating fist and gun fights which almost reach John Wick-ian levels of awesomeness.
JAY’S VERDICT
Go watch Reacher and then I will ask – “Are you not entertained?”
