Within five minutes of this new season – and after someone has been lobbed out of a helicopter – our improbably proportioned hero is already bouncing a carjacker’s noggin on the pavement. Welcome back, my friends, to the world of Reacher.
For those who missed the first series of this Prime Video action thriller, the show follows Jack Reacher, star of Lee Child's series of novels about a mysterious, wandering beefcake righting the wrongs of society with his vast intellect and fists like Iberico hams.
Series two is based on Child’s book Bad Luck and Trouble, the 11th of his insanely successful 28-strong Reacher series. It plays out, in TV terms, like an extended procedural, solving mysteries and dispatching baddies in swift rotation, and it’s gloriously, ridiculously, violently addictive.
Alan Ritchson returns as the titular character, the Incredible Hulk made flesh (is he, impossibly, even bigger this time round?). His Reacher is always three steps ahead, and doesn’t mind mixing it when things get dicey. Choice illustrations of this include when he opts to simply run through a wooden fence rather than climb over it, before halting a fleeing perp in his track by hurling a barbecue several hundred yards onto his car, like the rest of us throwing a tennis ball for a dog.
For this series, though, Reacher has to deal with his past. The chap defenestrated from the helicopter, it turns out, was a member of their shared former military police unit: the 110th Special Investigations, and the aerial execution of a pal is just not the sort of thing that our burly protagonist will gloss over (last season, you will remember, it was the murder of his brother).
So of course he starts getting the rest of the 110 band back together – a team of mavericks introduced via flashbacks – but as he does so, more of them start turning up dead and, inevitably, a deep criminal conspiracy is slowly revealed to be at play.
Ritchson does an excellent job of bringing charisma to the role of Reacher, especially as most of the shots basically frame him as if giving the audience a nudge and a wink and saying, ‘Cor, he’s big isn’t he?!’ Also added are the obligatory shots of this man mountain striding towards the camera with a furrowed brow and saying things like, “We’re going to need more guns.” Great stuff.
There is also a welcome return for Robert Patrick, who plays the corporate baddie at the heart of the mystery. He's not instantly recognisable, so how do we know it’s Robert Patrick, most memorable as the shape-shifting T-1000 in Terminator 2? Well, the script puts in a reference to Sarah Connor in his first scene. Subtle, this ain’t.
Reacher’s team banters and batters their way towards an inevitable showdown, and it is impossible not to be swept up in it. This is old school action, with stirring fight scenes; the sort of show in which supposedly real humans can be hit in the face with breezeblocks, fall off buildings, be shot multiple times, and carry on the same fight regardless.Child has talked about how the protagonist is “the age-old hero, the noble loner, the mysterious stranger, the knight errant, who comes to town with no yesterday, no tomorrow, he’s just there today. He fixes the trouble and then moves on”.
He's basically every dad’s fantasy – certainly those who grew up watching action movies in the Eighties and Nineties. A man bending the world to his will; one with no commitments or ties, irresistible to the opposite sex (though always chivalrous and acutely aware of the power dynamics at work), with the body we’d all get if we could just hit the gym that bit more often rather than having to fix the kids’ breakfast. He's unbeatable in a fight, loves a hardware store, oh and he has a strong line in the dad uniform of tan jackets and boot-cut jeans.
There’s also a string of dad jokes too. After a policeman questions his methods of killing the criminal “by barbecue” (the one he threw on the car). Reacher responds that it was a heart attack that saw off the unfortunate, and unhealthy, crimmo: “He was stopped by barbecue, he was killed by trans fats.” Incidentally, the scene where he's interrogating said criminal while giving him chest compressions is a hoot.
But it’s not just about plastering every bad guy in his way across the sidewalks of America, the show is at pains to point out that though Reacher may look like an action man made out of overinflated balloons, up top he’s a regular Sherlock Holmes.
He makes some whopping great leaps of logic to move the plot on (and is always, amazingly, correct) – marvel at how he deduces the bloke fell out of a helicopter not a plane, wonder at how he realises heroin is pivotal to the plot through a tattoo. And on and on… He’s always three steps ahead, get over it. Us dads would be like that too if we weren't so bloody tired.
This is a nostalgic nod to the actioners of the past, with a 2023 sensibility and a compelling lead, and has clearly landed with enough fans that it has been commissioned for a third season. If dad rock was a TV show, this would be it. And it’s rocking amazing.
