To paraphrase Isaac Hayes: "Reacher is a bad mother...(Shut your mouth) ... I'm talkin' 'bout Reacher. ... (Then we can dig it)."
Jack Reacher S4
The first three episodes of Season 4 are now streaming on Prime Video. Subsequent episodes will debut every Wednesday. I've watched all 24 episodes in all three previous seasons, as well as the first three new episodes.
Like John Shaft, created by Ernest Tidyman in his 1970 novel and immortalized by Richard Roundtree, Gordon Parks, and Isaac Hayes in the 1971 adaptation, Jack Reacher -- 'no Mister, just Reacher' -- was first created by Lee Child in his 1997 novel Killing Floor, which was adapted for the first season of the Prime Video series.
Of course, besides being 'bad mothers...,' John Shaft and Jack Reacher have little else specific in common, though neither hesitates to help 'the little people' in their battle against 'The Man.' As a former Military Policeman, Reacher has an abiding respect for the military and is naturally suspicious of those in authority.
On screen, the character, who stands 6 feet 5 inches tall, was poorly embodied by Tom Cruise in two films, which were, er, energetic. He is much better served by Alan Ritchson, who, although he is still a few inches short of Lee Child's creation, lumbers as he walks, shaking sidewalks and barely fitting through doors and under interior ceilings, as shot throughout the series to emphasize his hulking size, towering over everyone else in every scene, to the point that we fear for the health of his inevitable love partners.
Having read at least a half dozen Child / Reacher novels back in the day -- thank you, public libraries! -- I loved the idea of Reacher as an itinerant justice warrior, who carries nothing but the clothes on his back and 100 dollars in his pocket as he moves from one place to another. He is a taciturn loner, whose few loyalties run deep, though his conversations are brisk, to say the least.
In short, Reacher is a meat-and-potatoes character who quickly sniffs out trouble and never shies away from a fight, whether it involves his fists and legs, any nearby object, or any sort of weapon. As I wrote about Season 3 last year: "Big and lumbering, Alan Ritchson continues to look the role of Lee Childs' protagonist. He's also good at staring into the distance, which allows the other actors to read meaning into his eyes, which we, the viewers, can't see at all.
"Oh, well. There's plenty of movement on screen, as things go boom and bones get cracked and Anthony Michael Hall gets to play a bad guy with complete authority."
This season begins with Reacher in Philadelphia, where he can eat a Philly cheesesteak, let someone else crack wise about the "city of brotherly love," fight people, squeeze someone to death in a library and toss the body into a convenient coal dumpster (?!), kill someone else -- he only kills in self-defense, and he needs to self-defense a lot -- make friends with small-town policeman Jacob (Christopher Marquette), who is the adopted brother of a nervous woman whose suicide on a subway Reacher failed to prevent, as well as Philadelphia detective Tamara (Sydelle Noel), who is tired of being sidelined while partnered with cowardly Kevin Corrigan (great as always). He also encounters Lila (Agnez Mo), who is also some kind of justice warrior, though her motives are cloaked for the moment.
The jocular yet serious-minded tone is re-established in Episode 1, written by series developer Nick Santora. As I noted above, Reacher is a meat-and-potatoes character, and so is the series as a whole: Enjoyable, but nothing you haven't heard or seen before. Still, even though I am now a vegetarian, I am happy to sample from Reacher's table as I wait for him to beat up another bad guy and serve up his style of justice.
Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.