"Reacher," Season 1: review

[No major spoilers.]

Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels began coming out in the late 1990s, so for fans of the books, Reacher has been a known quantity for a long time. I never read any of the novels back in the day; it was only recently (sometime last year) that I picked up and read the very first Reacher novel, Killing Floor. Before that, as a kid, I read a few testosterone-soaked Mack Bolan the Executioner novels—action- and violence-filled pulp stories that influenced my early writing and made me the bane of English teachers who wanted their kids to write about pretty things, not exploding brains, skull-fragment shrapnel, and assorted organs torn to bloody shreds by various projectiles and bladed weapons. 

So my introduction to Jack Reacher came courtesy of Tom Cruise and his film "Jack Reacher" (reviewed here, ten years ago). Cruise gave the character gravitas and intensity, but the one thing the tiny Cruise couldn't give Jack Reacher was his sheer size. As described in the novels, Reacher is a huge, hulking, muscular man. A former military policeman with skills going way beyond normal military-police work, Reacher is the kind of man you never, ever want to fuck with. Child is on record as saying he wanted to create an imposing character who is very, very good at what he does, and who takes pleasure in dispensing violent payback when necessary. Jack Reacher has the primitivity, balls, and offended sense of justice of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, the muscularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, and the resourcefulness-under-pressure of Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer. That's the Jack Reacher of the books. Cruise did one more Reacher film called "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back," but that film fizzled at the box office, and a third Reacher movie was stalled and left to rot in development hell. Would we ever see Jack Reacher done right?

Amazon apparently took over the property and decided to do its own thing with Jack Reacher, an Amazon Original series aptly and brusquely titled "Reacher," with Lee Child himself being listed as one of the show's executive producers. Season 1 of "Reacher" came out this very month (February), and I just finished bingeing all eight episodes.

So let's get right to it: overall, I found the season, which is a mostly faithful retelling of Killing Floor, to be a mixed bag. The series is generally likable, and as some critics say, I can imagine the show's star, the humongous Alan Ritchson (who—I swear to God—looks as if he could be Dennis Quaid's lost, hypertrophic son), eventually growing into the part. On the assumption that each successive season will retell another of Child's novels, I can only assume that Jack Reacher will find himself surrounded by a different cast of characters with each successive story. I haven't read any other Reacher novels, so I don't know whether any characters aside from Reacher come back in subsequent adventures, but since Reacher is established to be a wanderer in the spirit of 70s-era TV series do-gooders like Kwai Chang Caine from "Kung Fu" or David Banner from "The Incredible Hulk," my hopes aren't high that the colorful folks we meet in Season 1 will ever return. A shame, that.

I won't get into the details of Season 1's story except to say that it involves Reacher on a personal level and has to do with deep-seated corruption in a small Georgia town that is just a little too perfect-seeming for its own good. The story includes the usual ugly-underbelly stereotypes about the Deep South—nasty police, racism hidden under casual "You're not from around here, are you?" remarks, twangy accents, and, in this case, a running joke about peach pie that doesn't get resolved until the final episode.

Let's talk a bit more abstractly about the show. Child (a Brit) did his homework, I think, regarding Georgia's weather, and the show faithfully recreates the South's heat, humidity, and unpredictable storms. The dialogue in "Reacher" occasionally has that quippy feel of an 80s-era action flick, with Alan Ritchson spouting lines that could have been said by Arnold Schwarzenegger; this sometimes drifts into the realm of the very corny. Another quirk of the dialogue is that a lot of it is very expository in nature; this is a talky TV series. Part of the reason for this is that Child constructed his central mystery the way Arthur Conan Doyle told Sherlock Holmes stories, i.e., by giving us the characters' insights, but not allowing the readers/viewers enough clues to figure out the mystery on their own (which is something Agatha Christie was excellent at). So we, the viewers, have little choice but to hang on to the dialogue if we want to understand even a little bit of what's happening, and it doesn't help that the mystery itself is rather convoluted.

The cinematography of the series was also something of a puzzle sometimes. While the camera work definitely evokes the South, there are times when the various episodes' directors go for shots that look almost embarrassingly retro, like a moment where Reacher's hulking form slowly emerges from a burning building after an explosion. How'd Reacher survive the explosion? Don't know, don't care, apparently.

But while the script and cinematography sometimes leave something to be desired, the character interactions are fairly well written. Reacher comes off as borderline autistic, or at least very socially retarded, but because he's such a self-confidently dangerous person, there's never a feeling that he's a wide-eyed fish out of water. He just is who he is, and part of who he is is that he's socially retarded—a straight shooter who answers with a simple "yes" when a man demands to know if Reacher is calling him a liar. Reacher is not about pleasantries and small talk. This made it hard for me to tell whether Alan Ritchson simply has limited range as an actor, or Reacher is written to be especially wooden and stoic.

Helping Reacher solve the mystery he's gotten wrapped up in are the town's chief of police, Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin, who eventually grew on me), and Officer Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald). Finlay is a black Northerner who has moved to this small Georgia town for his own reasons; Roscoe is a capable, intelligent cop who has to deal with fellow officers who are probably dirty. Watching Reacher, Finlay, and Roscoe interact is one of the show's many pleasures. It's also interesting to watch Finlay, who is the show's real fish out of water, try to navigate the negativity he encounters from various townspeople. Another character comes into play a few episodes in: private detective Frances Neagley (pronounced "Neally"), a super-competent woman who served under Reacher back in the day. I think I found her to be the most interesting character of them all, and if I recall correctly, she's not in the novel, so she was invented purely for the TV series to be a sort of helper and foil for Reacher (or her character was pulled from a later novel). Introducing her into the mix was a smart move because she made Reacher's military past come more alive, feel more real, thanks to their veteran's banter.

The show doesn't escape formula: along with the overly expository dialogue, there's a cringey bout of villain-monologuing toward the end of the season that almost defeated my suspension of disbelief. If you're a fan of the classic formula, you might enjoy that moment more than I did, but I was left almost snickering. These days, in many action movies, when a villain starts monologuing, the hero shoots him in mid-sentence and offers a quippy thought. Not so in "Reacher," where the drama is All 80s All the Time, and villains monologue away.

I was also not too impressed with the fight choreography. Alan Ritchson, huge as he is, moves more like a football player than a trained killer when he fights. There are martial arts out there that take advantage of a person's size, but Ritchson's version of Reacher comes off as a fairly conventional fighter except for a few entertaining neck-breaking scenes. I hope they improve the fight choreography in subsequent seasons; as things stand, Ritchson telegraphs his moves and doesn't hold himself as tightly as he should. Compare that to Tom Cruise's precise moves in the hilarious five-on-one street-fight scene in "Jack Reacher." Whoever coordinated that fight did a great job of making Cruise look like a competent martial artist who can casually dispense pain. The TV series has a lot to live up to.

So "Reacher" has that retro 80s feel, and despite some ugly, graphic moments, there's almost a blandness about the proceedings that makes the blood and gore bearable. I also felt that the show's tension could have been ratcheted higher; I've seen episodes of "24" that were far more tense. But maybe part of the problem is that I already knew the story, and even though the TV show changes some details and adds subplots, characters, and dialogue not found in the original novel, I could see where the plot was headed. No surprises.

All in all, I found "Reacher" to be a decent, bingeable watch, if for no other reason than that you get to see Alan Ritchson speak at length in Farsi (un-subtitled) with a cab driver during one scene. Was the season great? Was it riveting? No and no. But it was good and entertaining, and sometimes, that's enough.