At a very simple point, the Reacher stories are revenge stories. Somebody does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge.
Lee Child
I held onto the gun and stepped over to them. They were dead. I had seen a lot of dead people, and these two were as dead as any of them. The big Magnum shells had caught them high up on their backs. Where the big arteries and veins are, going on up into the head. The bullets had made quite a mess. I looked down at the two guys in the silence and thought about Joe. Then I had things to do.
“The Killing Floor”
Reacher, Season 1 (2022, Exec. Producer Nick Santoro):
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels are pulp on steroids, wish-fulfillment fantasies in which justice is meted out with maximum pain. Taking their cue from Westerns, each Reacher story follows a pleasingly familiar pattern: our lone hero comes upon a situation in which evildoers run rampant, and proceeds to clean up the mess, usually via an escalating body count. Reacher himself is a hyperbolic figure: a mountain of a man, a military veteran with an unwavering sense of justice, a defender of the downtrodden who can outthink anyone, a killer who prefers bone-crunching action over speech. Likewise, Child’s tumescent prose pushes thriller conventions to the edge of parody while maintaining a cathartic kick. The Reacher stories are far-fetched, faintly ridiculous, and yet their overpowering momentum cannot be denied.
Up to now, Reacher fans who have thirsted to see their hero brought to life have had to make do with two films starring the decidedly diminutive Tom Cruise in the role. Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher (2012), based on Child’s One Shot, was an honorable attempt to translate the character to the big screen, with Cruise downshifting to stoic mode; the less said about his generic sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), the better. Now Amazon takes a stab at the Reacher saga with its first season of Reacher, based on the first book in Child’s series, Killing Floor.
Reacher opens with Reacher (the fittingly gigantic Alan Ritchson) hitchhiking his way into the sleepy Georgia town of Margrave, only to promptly get arrested. Two unidentified bodies have been discovered, and the locals consider the hulking stranger a likely suspect—until it’s revealed that Reacher is a former Army special investigator, as he deduces the background of Chief Detective Finley (Malcolm Goodwin) with brisk Sherlockian aplomb. The rootless Reacher (“For the record, I’m not a vagrant, I’m a hobo,” he insists) would just as soon sample peach pie at the local diner and clear out of Margrave pronto, but when one of the corpses turns out to be someone with an intimate connection, you can be sure that those responsible will pay, police procedure and laws be damned. Or as he puts it: “I’m going to find out who did it, and then kill them all.”
Reacher‘s opening episodes do yeoman’s work in setting up its title character and world. Ritchson is no master thespian, but his semi-expressive mug suits the character to a tee, and he finds the funny in Reacher’s brutal economy, especially when Reacher lands in prison, forced to fend off a posse of inmates who have been paid to end him. “I’ll give you to the count of three,” he warns his would-be assassins, then goes HAM on them before even counting past one.
Much of the fun of Child’s books is due to Reacher’s hard-boiled first-person narration, as he plots, plans and executes the deaths of very bad men with a mixture of cold fury and spec-ops precision. Such an approach works on the printed page but would quickly wear thin onscreen, so Reacher opts to humanize (some would say soften) the character a bit with a higher volume of quips, plus frequent flashbacks to his youth, during which he learns honor and integrity from his older brother Joe (Gavin White). Scenes where Reacher comes to the aid of a poor defenseless dog are the cherry on top: who can hate a lug who cares about dogs? Despite these audience-friendly touches, all the footage lovingly devoted to Ritchson’s overpowering physique reinforces the primal point of Child’s books: This is one bad mutha.
Graham: You’re about to get your ass kicked.
Reacher: No. I’m just gonna break the hands of three drunk kids.
Graham: There’s four of us here.
Reacher: One of you has got to drive to the hospital.
In a Reacher story, the supporting cast are usually just pawns in the game, present only to be saved or taken out; here, they’re given room to breathe and bounce off our hero, particularly Roscoe (Willa Fitzgerald), the feisty police officer who might be the only honest cop in town, and Neagley (Maria Sten), an old comrade who’s handy with sleuthing and sniper rifles. Some of the character beats work better than others—Reacher and Finley bickering over car radio tunes is the stuff of tired buddy cop comedies—but Ritchman graciously allows his castmates to take some of the burden off his shoulders. He needs the backup: as the season progresses, it becomes clear that just about everyone of consequence in Margrave, from the mayor (Bruce McGill) to the industrialist who’s remaking the town (Currie Graham) are up to their necks in a major criminal conspiracy that stretches from Venezuela to Memphis. No moral shades of gray here: you’re either with the angels or worthy of getting bushwhacked or blown away.
Executive producer Nick Santoro, best known for Prison Break, gives Reacher a straightforward presentation that reflects its lead character’s no-nonsense approach, even as the narrative gets wild and casualties climb into the dozens. The show’s polished feel recalls that of Bosch and other made-for-Amazon mystery-thrillers, at the expense of some of the sweat and guts from Child’s novels. Less claustrophobic than Killing Floor, Reacher is most effective when it focuses on Reacher outsmarting and going medieval on miscreants; it falters when it strains to fill in its eight-episode length with investigative detours to New York and Mississippi. Reacher in action is a man in his element, and he (and the show) lose steam whenever he pauses for talky exposition and interrogations.
Just like Killing Floor, Reacher‘s first season concludes with a riot of violence, as the baddies get a well-deserved punishment. It’s the story’s most conventional element; indeed, it might bring back memories of muscle-headed action flicks from the nineties, which is when Killing Floor was written. But at least the book’s finale is a proper bloody exclamation point. Reacher is too well-groomed for that, and settles for a more mundane shoot-’em-up that lacks Child’s single-minded ferocity. Jack Reacher might be one of the good guys, but the true thrill of the Reacher books lies in his ability to wreak Biblical havoc on wrong’uns with impunity. The Reacher series has the right actor for the job; here’s hoping that future seasons will lean more into what the character is really about, and provide more guts with its blood. ■
