Amazon’s new series based on the classic Lee Child novels depends heavily on its hero’s celebrity — and not much else.
‘Reacher’ Finally shows That It’s Not Just Size That Matters. “Space is huge,” satirical sci-fi novelist Douglas Adams once said. You won’t believe how wide, gigantic, and mind-bogglingly large it is. You might think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s nothing in comparison to space.” Interchange the name Jack Reacher for “space,” and you have the basic concept of Lee Child’s two dozen Reacher novels produced over the previous 25 years.
Aside from his size, Jack Reacher has many additional distinguishing characteristics: He was an experienced Army investigator! He now lives as a nomad, travelling from town to town with little more than the clothes on his back and a folding travel toothbrush! He’s a skilled investigator with almost superhuman perception and time-keeping abilities!
Reacher is big: a six-foot-five wall of strength — with hands Child has equated to the sizes of both dinner plates and supermarket chickens at various times — who draws attention in every place he enters and is the favourite in the many, many, exceedingly many battles he gets into.
Jack Reacher calls himself a hobo, but he’s more of a ronin. He traverses the country on the spur of the moment, by foot and public transit, and when he gets in a town, you can bet he’ll run into a mid-level plot. He’s ideal for television since Jack Reacher is essentially a no-transformation-required combination of Bruce Banner/Hulk from The Incredible Hulk.
In this new eight-episode dramatisation, Alan Ritchson fills Tom Cruise’s painfully tiny shoes as Lee Child’s clever and cruel wandering ronin Jack Reacher.
There aren’t over ten minutes of “Reacher,” Prime Video’s series adaptation of Lee Child’s enduring book series, without someone referencing the namesake character’s terrifying size. Reacher, played here by Alan Ritchson (“Titans”), is referred to as a “giant,” a “Frankenstein’s monster,” and, without comedy, “250 pounds of frontier justice” at various moments. When characters aren’t inventing new phrases to describe Reacher’s stature, the camera uses forced perspective methods to make him appear even taller than the 6 feet 5 inches established in Child’s canon.
The focus on Reacher’s musculature is a good-faith effort to fans of Child’s 26-plus novels, some of whom were irritated by the two Reacher films starring Tom Cruise as a featherweight version of the famed bruiser. That piece of corrective fan service should be enough to legitimise the series for diehards. But there’s another thing to know about Jack Reacher: he’s more than a juggernaut, but not by much. An eight-hour serialised series may be too much real estate for a Jack Reacher of any size.
Tom Cruise, a pocket-sized Hollywood star, insisted on playing Reacher in two films. The films conveyed the character’s passion and self-sufficiency to varying degrees. However, Cruise lacked the mythological presence that has always differentiated Reacher from his action-movie predecessors, particularly his detective equivalents. Those Cruise films are superb thrillers (particularly the first), but they aren’t Jack Reacher films.
Even funnier, Amazon has centred the entire marketing campaign for their new Reacher series around star Alan Ritchson’s stature, falling just short of employing the phrase “Reacher’s tall again!” However, it turns out that size does not matter as much as you may think.
“Reacher” is technically a prequel, with creator Nick Santora meticulously recreating Child’s debut “Killing Floor.” But, like in the novel, Reacher enters fully developed, so there’s not much backstory to go through. He’s an ex-military police investigator who tours the nation on his pension, stumbling into criminal plots every thousand kilometres. During a haphazard detour in fictitious Margrave, Georgia, to discover more about a blues guitarist, Reacher becomes the prime suspect in a string of killings, one of which is very near to home. Naturally, it doesn’t take long for Reacher to clear his reputation and forge an unofficial alliance with Margrave’s best in order to find the true perpetrator and sting a few hornet nests.
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All the elements are in place for a compelling case-of-the-week drama centred on the “drifter with a heart of gold” stereotype that has dominated television since the days of “Kung Fu” and “Krav Maga.” While Reacher is a man of very few words, those few words are always a perfectly timed retort or a deduction so sage-like that it borders on the miraculous. He has a fractious but mutually respected relationship with Margrave’s foppish chief investigator, Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin), as well as a when-will-they-not-flirty relationship with Officer Roscoe Conkling (Willa Fitzgerald).
When the squad is viewing the splattery murder scenes, which are actually a touch toned down from Child’s gruesome descriptions, there’s even an uncomfortable lab worker to break the atmosphere.
But this is Prime Video, not CBS or USA circa “Burn Notice,” and “Reacher” is produced by Skydance Television, the same company that created Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series. While Prime Video is looking for the next “Game of Thrones,” its existing brand identity is tied to its successful Father’s Day fiction adaptations. Given the success of “Jack Ryan” and “Bosch” before it, a Reacher series, as well as its implementation, is an easy decision if the aim is to avoid repairing what isn’t broken.
So here’s “Reacher,” a super-sized and adrenalized remake of “Killing Floor” with even more sex, violence, and frantic cliffhangers.
The difference between “Reacher” and Amazon’s other dad-fic plays is that its protagonist-shaped emptiness becomes increasingly visible as the show progresses. That’s not a knock on Ritchson, whose casting is nothing short of amazing. Ritchson’s physicality is ideal for the role, and he possesses the charm required to bridge the gap between Child’s violent Reacher and Cruise’s version, which replaces the visible strength with stealth and skill. Ritchson shines in the action sequences but maintains the mentality of a man who battles his way out of trouble because he wants to, not because he can’t talk his way out.
The flaw is Reacher himself, a popular character with attributes that make him unable to anchor a prolonged drama.
Reacher leads to a solitary existence, travelling with only a toothbrush and occasionally stopping to gain secondhand T-shirts after the previous one becomes soaked with henchmen blood. He’s most renowned for his violent, Krav Maga-inspired fighting style, which is well-represented here in moments when he tears through groups of generic toughs with little fuss. He never gets a single conclusion wrong as he works his way through the riddle. Forget about moral quandaries, since Reacher’s compass is always pointing north.
Finally, Reacher isn’t the type of character who can carry a dynamic through line throughout eight episodes, especially without voiceover conversation. Voiceover is overdone these days, but “Killing Floor” is recounted in first person, which gives a character who desperately needs its interiority. “Reacher” comes closest, with a sequence of flashback scenes focusing on his early years as a military brat. And the upshot from those moments is that Reacher has been essentially the same guy since elementary school: quiet, scrappy, and strangely appealing to thugs who go in packs of four and attack one at a time.
So far, we’ve seen Jack Reacher adaptations that are both uncomfortably indifferent in the source material and frustratingly overly true to it. I like the Amazon version, and while I wouldn’t mind watching another season, I’d probably rather read another book.
So far, we’ve seen one cinematic Jack Reacher with charisma but not size, and another with the opposite. There are actors that have both — most of them are ex-wrestlers — but I fear that two efforts may be all we get for a book series that has proven to be extremely difficult to adapt.
