Amazon’s ‘Reacher’: TV Review

On social media, the only archetype more irritating — not “evil” or “obnoxious,” simply “irritating” — than “Here’s How to Get Into Cryptocurrency” Guy might be “But Jack Reacher Is Supposed to Be Tall, Actually” Guy.

I can say that, because I’m That Guy, or one of those guys. You know why?

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Jack Reacher is supposed to be tall, actually. He’s not casually or incidentally tall. His being 6’5″, 250 pounds is a fact that comes up with some regularity in the books by Jim “Lee Child” Grant. But even that doesn’t do it justice. Jack Reacher is gravitationally huge. Yes, he’s military-honed, an expert marksman and a Sherlock Holmes-level investigator. But more than anything, Jack Reacher takes up space.

Then they made two Jack Reacher-centric movies that starred Tom Cruise and people with no experience with the books were confused why “But Jack Reacher Is Supposed to Be Tall, Actually” Guy was so freaked out. Christopher McQuarrie and Ed Zwick made two perfectly OK action movies that gave zero indication that anybody involved actually liked the books they were adapting.

Amazon’s new Reacher TV show will not face that complaint. Series creator Nick Santora’s eight-episode series gives every indication of understanding the things that make Jack Reacher distinctive and entertaining as a character. Somewhat predictably, Santora’s hopelessly devoted approach to medium-jumping presents its own issues, underlining instead of correcting flaws from a franchise I adore even as I understand its myriad imperfections.

Jack Reacher describes himself as a hobo, but he’s much more of a ronin. He travels the country, by foot and by public transportation, based solely on whims and when he arrives in a town, you can guarantee that he’s going to stumble into a mid-level conspiracy. He’s perfectly tailored for television since Jack Reacher is basically a no-transformation-required combo of Bruce Banner/Hulk from The Incredible Hulk.

Santora has adapted Killing Floor, the first published Reacher novel, which begins with Reacher (Alan Ritchson) getting off a bus on the outskirts of Margrave, Georgia. In this case, his whim involves learning about mysterious bluesman Blind Blake, and the conspiracy kicks in almost immediately when Reacher is arrested for murder. Even when it becomes clear that he wasn’t the killer, Reacher sticks around in Margrave to help uptight detective Oscar (Malcolm Goodwin) and dogged cop Roscoe (Willa Fitzgerald) solve what turns out to be a crime with very personal ties.

Santora and his writing team have captured many of Reacher’s eccentricities, from his no-frills approach to packing — a passport, small wad of cash and travel toothbrush — to his obsessive accumulation of roadside trivia to this gigantic man-of-few-words’ love of quippy rejoinders. The season balances Reacher’s brutal physicality — I don’t love anything as much as Jack Reacher loves using his forehead to break somebody’s nose — and his Holmesian deductive reasoning. It’s mostly a strict adaptation of Killing Floor — one of Reacher’s later recurring allies is added for fun — and I never doubted the creative team’s affection for the source material for a second.

But Child’s books are compulsively readable page-turners, not unimpeachable literature, and their flaws may be harder to ignore in this format.

To begin with, the Reacher novels really aren’t about individual plots. I’ve read 20-ish Reacher books and if you offered me only their titles — Child is awful at titles — I couldn’t tell you what any of them were about. And even if you told me, I could probably only offer specifics for half of them. Killing Floor, with its backdrop of financial crimes and livestock, is actually in that group of stories I remember, but when midseason episodes became almost nonstop clunky exposition, I kept thinking how much I was missing Reacher breaking people’s noses with his forehead. A six-episode season would have tightened the storytelling yet still wouldn’t have fixed an instigating event that is irritatingly coincidental even in a franchise that thrives on big coincidences.

I’m not sure how you could have enhanced the plausibility of that coincidence, nor am I sure how Reacher could have fixed the fact that I’ve never bought into a single one of the character’s sexual dalliances — one per book, like the impeccable internal clock in Reacher’s head. Sometimes there’s a disturbing age difference. Sometimes he hooks up with a more mature woman, with Child obsessively mentioning a streak of gray hair or a hint of crow’s feet as if Jack Reacher’s true triumph of justice was age-appropriate dating. They’re all contrived, and Fitzgerald’s convincingly hard-edged performance — complete with the show’s only respectable Southern accent — is powerless to help. Because Ritchson is playing a younger version of Reacher, all flirtation is merely perfunctory instead of irredeemably icky. So there’s that.

And that leads me, finally, to the biggest flaw that any Jack Reacher adaptation is going to face: I’ve been asked many times on Twitter who I’d want to play Jack Reacher if Tom Cruise wasn’t acceptable, and I’ve given an assortment of answers: Holt McCallany. Stephen Lang, but 25 years ago and only if nobody Googles his height. Burt Lancaster if this were 1965. Elizabeth Debicki as Jacqueline Reacher. But the answer might turn out to simply be, “Nobody. Lee Child has made a character who can’t be played by a real human.”

Ritchson has some of the right physicality. At 6’2″, he’s too short, but the series directors have smartly shot him in ways that emphasize and embellish his size — low angles, frame-filling close-ups, etc. Care has been taken to surround Ritchson with conspicuously small co-stars, including Fitzgerald, the always solid Goodwin and Kristin Kreuk, playing the wife of a key suspect. Everybody in the show goes maybe to Ritchson’s mid-chest and it all points to how somebody like Peter Jackson could have used miniatures and forced perspective to actually sell a Cruise-as-Reacher vehicle.

That doesn’t mean Ritchson’s physicality is exactly right. Ritchson, like The Rock and John Cena and Dave Bautista and other size-appropriate people Twitter tends to suggest for a 6’5″ 250-pound character, looks like he spent nine months in a gym preparing for the role. He’s cut and the camera loves ogling his naked torso. But he, like The Rock, looks like something carved from granite. Jack Reacher should be a boulder. He’s never gone to the gym in his life, preferring a regimen of extensive walking and intermittent ass-kicking. No matter how fixated Ritchson’s Reacher may be on revenge, he primarily strides through town looking like he wants somebody to spot for him, bro.

This will bother fans of the books more than normal humans, who will be more likely to notice that Ritchson can’t make Reacher’s unique speech patterns work. Whether it’s the hamminess of the character’s quips and threats or his affectless recitation of the information behind his brilliant clue-following, Ritchson comes across as a condescending white knight out of a direct-to-video ’80s action movie. This may be a flawless execution of what he was asked to do, incidentally, illustrating how precariously small the gap is between what plays as gruffly badass on the page and flatly smug on-screen.

I wonder if this take would have played better if the series’ directors had gone with a look and pacing that was less TNT-friendly — minus some graphic nudity — procedural potboiler and more Banshee-style pulp. Why not steer into the craziness of a brilliant giant showing up in a small town and killing dozens of people instead of the formula of a former military policeman solving crimes? I’ll just go out on a limb and say that everything would have been improved if production could have taken place actually in Georgia as opposed to Ontario, which never finds an iota of regional authenticity here.

So now we’ve had Jack Reacher adaptations that have been annoyingly uninterested in the source material and frustratingly over-faithful to the source material. I prefer the Amazon version, and I wouldn’t mind another season, but I’d probably still rather read another book.

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