Amazon's new series based on the iconic Lee Child books leans way into its hero’ stature and not much else.
THE SATIRIC SCI FI author Douglas Adams once wrote Space is big. You just would not believe how vastly hugely mind bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think its a long way down the road to the chemists but thats just peanuts to space.Now substitute the name Jack Reacher for space and you essentially have the core conceit of the two dozen or so Reacher thrillers written by Lee Child over the last 25 years.
Jack Reacher has many other notable traits besides being huge: He was a veteran Army investigator. He now lives as a hobo wandering from town to town with little but the clothes on his back and a folding travel toothbrush He has a brilliant detective with almost superhuman powers of perception and time keeping. Mostly though Reacher is big a six foot five wall of muscle with hands Child has at various points compared to the size of both dinner plates and supermarket chickens who draws attention in every room he enters and is the favorite in the many many extremely many fights he gets into.Hilariously pocket sized movie star Tom Cruise insisted on playing Reacher in a pair of movies. The films more or less captured the characters intensity and self sufficiency. But Cruise lacked the mythical stature thats long distinguished Reacher most clearly from his action movie peers, and especially from his sleuthing counterparts. Those Cruise movies are good thrillers the first especially but they are not really Jack Reacher movies.
Even more hilariously, Amazon has built the entire marketing campaign for its new Reacher series around star Alan Ritchson’s build, stopping just shy of using the tagline: “Reacher’s tall again!” But this turns out to be a case where size doesn’t matter matter as much as you might hope.Ritchson has played superheroes in shows like Smallville and Titans, and he’s statuesque enough to look plausible casually bursting out of a pair of flex cuffs. But whenever his shirt comes off (which is often), he has the smooth muscle definition of a man who spends four hours a day in a gym with a personal trainer, followed by another two getting touch-ups at the salon, rather than a slightly evolved caveman who came by his strength through scraps and brawls. Ritchson’s 12-pack is a physical manifestation of a tonal problem: His Reacher is smarmy and pleased with himself, rather than casually secure in his own vast abilities. He’s a generic vigilante who just happens to look like a mountain next to the small-town Georgia cops (played by Malcolm Goodwin and Willa Fitzgerald) who assist him in this maiden adventure(*).
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