There’s a lot (both figuratively and literally) to love about the new season of Reacher – streaming on Prime Video from Feb 20. Travis Johnson gets to grips with the appeal of this gargantuan hero and previews what’s to come in season three.
Three episodes of Reacher season 3 drop on Prime Video this February 20th, which is handy because there’s a moment in the third one that neatly encapsulates the core appeal of author Lee Child’s hulking hobo hero. If you’ve not sampled the violent and vicarious pleasures offered by the series—literary or televisual—skip up to this bit and you’ll instantly know if you’re on board or not. It starts at about the nine-minute mark.
Our hero, musclebound former military policeman Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson, keenly aware he’s landed the role of a lifetime here), is on a little side-mission before meeting up with his DEA contact/ally, Agent Sarah Duffy (British actor Sonya Cassidy affecting an insane New England accent—she calls him “Reachah”). Reacher’s errand necessitates a bit of maritime infiltration—he has to swim in and out of his target location, which he promptly does, surging through the nighttime tide like… well, like Aquaman, a character that longtime students of Ritchson’s career will know he once played on seminal superhero soap Smallville.
For her part, Agent Duffy is left waiting for Reacher to return—and return he does, striding through a moonlit fogbank in nothing but his swimming trunks like a modern-day frost giant strolling down a mountain to lay waste to some hapless Viking village, wet skin gleaming, muscles bulging.
“Fuck me…” Duffy breathes, and we smash cut to the title: REACHER.
Yep, that’s our Jack Reacher, modern day knight errant, the Biggest Hobo, roaming the highways and byways of America, getting into trouble, helping out the helpless, and slaughtering various villains by the carload with a deadly combination of his razor-sharp investigative acumen and his honking great meat hooks.
It’s the latter that counts the most, though, and the above scene, as deliriously over the top and thirsty as it is, encapsulates the central appeal of the character: Jesus Christ, he’s big. A man mountain—the Vanilla Gorilla, as military veteran and critic Vycevictus memorably dubbed him, more a primal force than a mere human.
That’s part of why the two Jack Reacher theatrical outings didn’t quite work, despite the best efforts of star Tom Cruise; for all the charisma and intensity that the Last Movie Star brought to bear on the role, he just wasn’t big enough. Robert Patrick, who played villain Shane Langston in season two, swears that Ritchson is bigger now than his Terminator 2: Judgment Day co-star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was back in the day, and he ought to know. In stature, Cruise is closer to another Schwarzenegger co-star—Danny DeVito.
Patrick isn’t returning this season, though; Reacher turfed him out of a helicopter at the climax of season two (bad guys rarely retire quietly in Reacher’s world). This season— based on the seventh Reacher novel, Persuader—villain duties fall to former Breakfast Club member Anthony Michael Hall. He’s playing shady rug dealer Zachary Beck, a man whose lavish lifestyle and ever-present army of bodyguards indicate to the DEA that he’s more likely than not involved in dealing in something that rhymes with “rugs”. They need a man on the inside, and so our humungous hero inveigles himself into the Beck household, quickly befriending Beck’s lonely and alienated teenage son, Richard (Johnny Berchtold).
A sensitive kid already down an ear thanks to a botched kidnapping, à la real world heir John Paul Getty III, Richard could really use someone in his corner, and who better than a man with roughly the same protein requirements as an adult Tyrannosaur? For all its blood ‘n’ thunder action, Reacher has interesting things to say about the notion of positive masculinity, and so the big guy becomes a mentor to the poor little rich boy, even as he’s trying to take down his old man.
But while Anthony Michael Hall’s Beck may be the big bad this season (well… maybe…) there’s another more immediate and much more physical threat lurking in the wings in the form of Paulie, one of Beck’s security goons, played Dutch bodybuilder Olivier Richters (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). And not to put too fine a point on it, but Olivier Richters is a towering seven feet, two inches tall. They call him the Dutch Giant.
You see, when your protagonist is basically a thick stack of striated muscle tissue with eyes, the challenge becomes finding antagonists that offer even the most remote physical threat. Sure, every few episodes we get tend to get a scene where a handful of hired mooks display a work ethic well above their pay grade by trying to run Reacher off, which goes as well as can be expected. And while that’s fun—and often very funny—it doesn’t provide much in the way of dramatic tension. Now, at last, we have a bad guy who actually presents a credible danger to our hobo behemoth.
So yeah, Reacher season three: yes, there’s a mystery with plenty of twists and turns and intrigue aplenty. Yes, there are bursts of action punctuated with tough-guy one-liners. Yes, there’s even a ghost from Reacher’s past to contend with. But we all know what the main event is: The Dutch Giant vs The Vanilla Gorilla. That’s appointment television.
