My Bromance With Reacher is OVER
Kapil Gupta claims that when we’re able to quit something it’s because we can “see through it.”
Amazon’s original series REACHER is like that once-in-a-lifetime catch — the translucent ghost lobster found off Maine’s coast in 2017. It looks exotic; it’s a surprise package you didn’t know you’d wanted to open.
It stars the handsome and impossibly-sculpted Alan Ritchson (who can also - on occasion - act). It’s very different from - say - High Potential - a TV series about a late-shift cleaning woman who (after hours, at the LAPD’s Major Crimes division) discovers the flaws in an ongoing investigation while dusting and dancing to Heavy Cross by Gossip; instead, Reacher serves up a title character who has a background in special investigations; he was a police major; and he saw the kind of combat reserved for Forrest Gump (if Gump had the body of The Rock and the thought/speech patterns of Robert B. Parker’s detective Spenser). It makes sense that Jack Reacher is smart and big and better than you.
But it’s really like that lobster because you can see right through it.
I had been lulled into a false sense of euphoria by Season One. Perhaps it’s my man-crush on Ritchson who reminds me of long-lost childhood friend Danny Griffith who works for our hometown police department. Remarkably, Ritchson once provided motion capture and voiceover work for the Mutant Ninja Turtle film franchise when he was an unknown quantity. He recounts being stuck on set, penniless, contractually obligated to remain at the studio long after the day’s work had wrapped and the AM cleaning staff was mopping the floor.
But as Jack Reacher, Ritchson is a jacked lumberjack who wouldn’t need a tire jack (and he’s no tired-Jack, more like a fully formed, adult Jack-Jack). He’s a Nepalese mountain in a tank-top. He’s 1% body fat if the margin for error is 1%. He’s - perhaps - too big to be as agile as his character demands (Jack be nimble, and all that…). Reacher’s name seems fully loaded with allegory, but I can’t seem to unpack it. At 6’ 4” (although I believe he claims an extra inch in the pilot episode), Reacher/Ritchson has “great reach” (in a fist-fight). As a special investigator for the military, no criminal was “beyond his reach.” Yes, I suppose it’s a bit of a reach to ascribe any kind of purpose to his surname. He’s a superhero without the mutation; the name just gives his mortal coil a verb-like quality: he’s constantly in motion.
I once loved Season One. It was eight chances to enter a southern hamlet (the fictional Margrave, Georgia) that has some of the same noir qualities of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and reminded me of a week I’d spent outside Atlanta in a small town that seemed like a pop-up movie set.
Reacher showrunner Nick Santora has made some great (and good) television; he’s played a role in bringing select episodes of The Sopranos, Lie to Me, and Prison Break to your iPhone or laptop. And Reacher’s pilot is ripped not just from the Lee Child novel Killing Floor, but feels like a reboot of Prison Break.
Think about it: two brothers (Link and Michael), one is a Colossus, the other a more thoughtful, cerebral, introvert. One is trapped in prison; the other has to break him out. Dramatic irony: Reacher’s brother Joe has been killed as the pilot opens. He spends the next thirty minutes realizing that he’s in a holding cell accused of Joe’s homicide. Reacher has to play both parts: he’s the contemplative bruiser who must rescue himself from gen-pop when he’s transferred to federal prison. He must solve the (larger) crime (a money laundering scheme with South American roots) when law enforcement, local government and the justice system has made getting real justice impossible.
By the end of Season One, Jack Reacher has solved for peace by murdering Venezuelan money launderers, a Venezuelan death squad (who is remarkably sanitary in their hazmat suits), Kliner employees, and members of the Kliner crime family (the town’s villainous patriarch and his snarling son cut from an Eric Trump template).
He doesn’t do it alone, but - to misquote The Book of Mormon - it’s mostly him.
Margrave is rid of its toxic elements, but it is far from saved. The Kliners had artificially long pumped-up the remote Georgian town with dirty money. In their absence, who will polish the statue plaque affixed to Casper Teale in the town square? Who will employ its citizens?
My adoration for Santora’s Margrave world-building — the cozy, intimate space being upended by ruthless boogeymen who’d home-invade and castrate at will — literally evaporated with the onset of Season Two.
It wasn’t a sophomore slump, it was a secondary-Ebola rash. Season Two doesn’t feature Reacher the loner, the one-man-wrecking-crew (with a brain and a heart), but Reacher the pack animal, deferring to nearly everyone, putting himself in the kind of harm’s way reserved only for the truly stupid.
Season Two is embarrassing on many levels. It feels filmed by someone just learning how to use a hand-held camcorder from the mid-80s. It has all of the wit and wisdom of a Disney Channel tween-tale.
And - five episodes in - Season Three shows all the problems of the one-trick-mighty-horse that Reacher is emerging as. It could have been filmed anywhere and nowhere. At times I’m reminded of Newport or Narragansett, RI (Beck’s mansion), but scenes filmed in town are decidedly Cold Spring or Croton-on-Hudson, NY. There are exterior shots of factories and industrial buildings that have all the local color of a 1930s newsreel. Season Two fares no better: it’s set in New York but it’s filmed in Canada, and it looks every centimeter the Great White North.
I’ve put in my time.
I’ve watched Season One repeatedly (all of it). I’ve suffered through Season Two like someone watching CNN on mute at the airport. I’ve left myself open to the possibility that Season Three will be a return to form. But - as I’ve seen it now - I can now see through it [so I don’t feel compelled to see it through].
Reacher is little more than superhero franchise IP. Objectively, the Tom Cruise filmic version sucked birch bark, hard (right off the tree). I haven’t read the book series and likely won’t. Season One worked because it was Reacher alone, in a context that felt dark and glorious all at once.
Season Three really tries to recreate that magic of man alone, against the elements, but Reacher’s fiery partner (played by Brit Sonya Cassidy) has a Boston accent so bad (and I’m from outside Boston) that it’s like French manicured tips on the blackboard of a one room schoolhouse with great acoustics. It’s laughable and cringe-inducing in one fell swoop. It gets in the way, or, perhaps it lights up the exit sign.
Season Three just reminds me that every season will unfold identically: Reacher will get drawn into something bigger than he realizes, he’ll play dumb, he’ll play smart, there will be a tropey shootout at a factory, warehouse, or plant, he’ll be in danger but never really “be in danger.” A woman, in all likelihood, will have to save him, but he will have had to save her first, or there’s a history of chivalry between them, or there’s ongoing chemistry — but he’s always respectful to the point of being monastic. His only appetite appears to be for peach pie or Wickian revenge.
Season Two ended with Reacher throwing the villain du jour from a helicopter. Many episodes prior, he’d said something to the baddy on the telephone like, “I’m going to enjoy throwing you out of a helicopter.” Arresting television, ain’t it?
As for how Season Three will end, I’m not sure. There are just three episodes left. I think the only reason I watch is because the show makes me feel 13 again. In 1985 and 1986, two movies whispered something to me about my manhood and my place in the world: Commando and Cobra. My mother had taken me to see these films (both rated R; in fact, Cobra had an X rating until its violent content was tempered), and I sat in the theater, right next to her, melting away from the world.
Suddenly, I was Arnold. I was Sly. I could have stepped out of that theater and stepped on the neck of anyone in my Herman Survivor boots.
As a pencil-neck geek in the mid 80s, weighing in at 85 pounds soaking wet, I would have more likely blown away in a medium force gale than successfully carried out an ass-whipping.
And I’m not 13 anymore, so I don’t have to see Reacher any longer, because I’ve seen through it.
