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- Reacher season four review: We're in safe hands as this thrilling, funny and slightly moving drama returns
Reacher season four review: We're in safe hands as this thrilling, funny and slightly moving drama returns
Alan Ritchson is back for a fourth series of Prime Video's crime thriller. And this could well be the best team yet...
Prime
- Jack Seale
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★★★★☆
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Reacher never lets you down. Every adventure featuring author Lee Child’s ex-military police officer Jack Reacher, perfectly embodied by an inflatable beef mountain of an actor named Alan Ritchson, is the same: Reacher ambles into a new town, immediately comes across some sort of conspiracy, and investigates. Gradually he acquires a posse of local oddballs, who may or may not be cops but who have a latent desire to take lethal risks in the cause of righting wrongs. Then they smash a fearsome organised crime ring despite being ludicrously outnumbered. The end.
But the rigid formula of this Prime Video series isn’t a drag, it’s a comfort. Reacher, an oak tree in classic blue jeans, stands strong when others flee. He girds his principles when others succumb to threats and bungs. He cares about doing things fully and rigorously, every time without fail. He increasingly feels like a reaction to a world gone wrong. Reacher is one place where the bad guys never get away with it.
This year he’s waddling sturdily around Philadelphia, minding his own business, when he witnesses a death on a subway train. It’s an upsetting encounter that means Reacher is driven more by guilt and regret than before, but he soon recovers his mojo when the FBI, the CIA and other untrustworthy three-initial organisations start sending dim-bulbs in dark suits to meddle in the case, which tells Reacher the game is afoot. Then two mercenary henchmen try to mug him for info he doesn’t have. Naturally he pulps them, but the unpleasantness confirms the demise of the woman on the train, a government administrator, wasn’t just an isolated tragedy.
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On Reacher’s side this year are Tamara (Sydelle Noel), a police detective jaded by the crappy cases she’s usually given; Jacob (Christopher Marquette), another cop who has previously stuck to traffic violations and desk-jockeying, because until now he’s lacked the physical courage to fight proper villains; and Russell (Kevin Weisman), an archetypal renegade journalist who sources info from the dark web and lives in a condemned loft. The four of them band together to help an Indonesian émigré, Lila (Agnez Mo), who informs them that the cover-up they’ve stumbled upon relates to America’s shady interactions with a dictator in her country back in the 1990s.
It might be the best Reacher team yet, with each member of it espousing, in a different way, the series's philosophy of refusing to take no for an answer if that answer is given in bad faith by a dodgy authority figure. And there’s also a lovely, unexpected romance in there waiting to tentatively reveal itself.
As for Reacher himself, his deadpan humour remains impeccable. Watching him deliberately give literal answers to stupid questions never gets old, and neither does the pleasure he takes in insulting people immediately if they set off his finely tuned pomposity radar. We’re here for the dry wit as much as we are the extreme violence.
Well, maybe not quite as much. The stramashes are Reacher’s signature scenes, and this time around they have even more of an old-school feel, with more punch-ups than shootouts. Hand-to-hand combat is where it’s at. A running theme is Reacher indulging in the simple, classic beauty of the traditional headbutt, and the epic final episode has Jean-Claude Van Damme and the Raid movie franchise in its tasting notes.
There’s perhaps a sharper, darker edge to the fights, too. More than one assailant emerges from a duel with Reacher not just with the customary smashed nose and splintered ribs, but with whole body parts missing: his removal of a rogue CIA agent’s ear is as pleasingly imaginative as it is physically implausible. Our man is also not afraid to kill in cold blood if the dead guy’s departure from society is a net positive.
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It’s thrilling and funny and just so slightly moving in places, as it always is. That’s Reacher. You’re in very large, very safe hands.
Authors
Jack Seale
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