Language: English
I have nothing against Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher movies, to be honest, especially the first one (called, simply, Jack Reacher) which was a good, solid, well-crafted thriller directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who has since made good use of Cruise’s action star derring-do in these last few Mission Impossible films. It had the added attraction of watching good ol’ Robert Duvall in a very entertaining cameo. Hell, it even had the rare sight of Werner Herzog (one of the greatest directors alive) playing the lead villain, going toe-to-toe with one of the last and biggest superstars on the planet. It’s just that Jack Reacher and Reacher: Never Go Back weren’t really Reacher films. They had very little to do with their source material, Lee Child’s eponymous series of novels that began in 1997 and is still going strong, over 20 books into the series. Fans of the books were understandably disappointed at not seeing more of the on-page Reacher.
All that’s in the past now, though, with Amazon Prime Video’s new series Reacher, starring Alan Ritchson as the ex-military cop who now roams the American countryside, dishing out his own brand of justice with his 6’5, 300-pound frame and dinner-plate sized hands. The buffed-up Ritchson (who has previously played superhero characters on shows like Smallville and Titans) is not quite Reacher-sized: he’s 6’2 but he has been shot very cleverly here, with low angles and especially diminutive co-actors everywhere you see. In several interviews, author Lee Child commented that he did not feel Tom Cruise’s 5’7 stature would be a problem for the Reacher movie—but fans weren’t nearly as forgiving.
Lee Child loyalists are in for a treat, because this Reacher starts at the beginning: the story here is faithfully adapted from the very first Reacher novel of them all: Killing Floor. Reacher arrives at Margrave, Georgia in search of the grave of an early 20th c. blues musician he loves, Arthur “Blind” Blake. But upon arrival, he finds himself in the middle of a string of grisly murders, beginning with Reacher’s older brother Joe, who was working for Homeland Security. Our hero must team up with grouchy, vegetarian, tweed-wearing local police detective Oscar Finley (Malcolm Goodwin, superb) and deputy Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald) to solve the crimes, clear his name—and possibly, avert a national security disaster.
Sounds simple enough, right?
For the most part, Reacher sticks to both the medieval “knight-errant” stories Child was inspired by originally—as well as the streaming era’s ‘small-town-crime’ template. There’s a kindly barber who becomes Reacher’s ally, there’s an evil businessman who owns half the town, practically, and there are enough shady characters and hired muscle-men to keep Reacher busy.
The action scenes are very well-choreographed and Ritchson demonstrates his brute strength on several occasions, including one for comic effect, where he opens a beer bottle with his biceps (it’s much cooler than it sounds).
I was also impressed by how closely Reacher’s fighting style here resembles Child’s descriptions from the book— head-butts to the nose, knees to the groin and elbow strikes to the diaphragm are Reacher’s favorites because they’re disorienting blows that allow him to use his size quickly and decisively (there are at least a dozen jokes throughout the season about Reacher’s unreal size and they’re all very funny). The only objective is winning: this is not pretty or aesthetically slo-mo’d fighting, this is a highly trained fighter approaching every clash like a barroom brawl. Amidst all the bone-crunching action, Reacher also manages to get in some good ol’ fashioned action jibes: after snapping off a pair of plastic zip-ties from his wrists, Reacher asks the police station cheekily: “Do you guys recycle?”
A word about Ritchson’s colleagues here, especially Goodwin and Fitzgerald who both disappear into their roles—Goodwin’s Finley is a city-slicker, a Harvard grad who has banished himself to Margrave as a kind of personal penance, while Fitzgerald’s Roscoe has compassion, street-smarts, aptitude with firearms and the best Southern accent in the show.
Reacher isn’t as well-written as some of the other recent examples of the ‘small-town conspiracy’ subgenre, like Mare of Easttown or True Detective. The dialogue too often falls into exposition hell or trite territory. But it has enough genre thrills and visceral delights to keep you hooked, and in Ritchson they have a charismatic leading man who’s clearly having a lot of fun playing a superhero-sans-powers, effectively. All of this bodes well for Amazon and I can see Reacher becoming a mainstay for the network (as Jack Ryan has now become) in the years ahead.
Reacher is streaming on Amazon Prime video.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/reacher-review-alan-ritchson-manages-to-get-in-some-good-ol-fashioned-action-jibes-10346401.html
