We had a nice long run of ski-able weather, but Mud Season is upon us once more, which means I’m back to riding the stationary bike in the basement for exercise and watching streaming video to keep myself sane. The most recent series on the box has been Amazon’s Reacher, which I finished this morning.
This series is based on, as the title card awkwardly puts it “Killing Moon by Lee Child and his character Jack Reacher,” which reads like Reacher is his own co-author. There are a bunch of these, none of which I’ve read. There’s also a previous movie adaptation which I haven’t watched, so the only thing I know about it is that fans ridicule it for starring the diminutive Tom Cruise.
The star of the Amazon series is Alan Ritchson, who is considerably larger than Cruise, a fact that is much remarked upon both in the show and in online conversations about the show. A lot of the plot hinges on him being The Biggest And The Strongest, and there’s a running bit about his inability to find clothes that fit.
The latter was very amusing to me, because IMDB lists Ritchson’s height as 6’2” in American units, which would make him 3-4 inches shorter than me. He does loom impressively over the rest of the cast, but the actual lesson of that is that basically everyone in Hollywood is tiny. As a Person of Size, I can confirm, though, that a lot of the reactions he gets are authentic— I’m nowhere near as ripped as Ritchson is, and I get a ton of “Whoa! Check out the giant!” (It gets kind of tedious, honestly…)
Happily, this does not play into the “Big Equals Dumb” trope that poisons a lot of Hollywood for me. Reacher is not only The Biggest And The Strongest, he’s also smarter than everyone else he meets, and just hyper-competent at everything. Which is a nice change of pace, if also a bit of obvious wish-fulfillment.
Which brings us around to the plot, which is preposterous from start to finish. Jack Reacher, late of the US Army, is walking the earth like Caine from Kung Fu, and stops in Margrave, Georgia, based on some tenuous connection to an old blues singer. He’s picked up as an obvious suspect in the murder of two men on the outskirts of town, one of whom turns out to be his brother Joe, an agent for the counterfeit-fighting side of the Secret Service. He teams up with the only two honest cops in Margrave to take on a local system that turns out to be a whole lot darker than anyone realized.
This involves a really impressive body count, both of native Georgians and imported gangsters, killed in an interesting array of styles. It also involves a lot of incidents that are kind of baffling even by the standards of thriller shows— gunfights in broad daylight that don’t attract any police response, Federal employees turning up dead without anyone asking questions, that sort of thing. There’s really not a lot in this that makes any actual sense.
It is, however, great fun because the cast— chiefly Ritchson, but also Malcom Goodwin and Willa Fitzgerald as the good cops— really sell it. Pretty much everyone involved seems to be having a blast, and they carry it all off with enough aplomb to make it a very enjoyable watch, despite the nonsensical aspects. It’s really pretty much perfect for watching while biking to nowhere— diverting but not actually surprising, with enough twists to distract from tedious activity but not require much complex thought.
So, you know, if you find yourself stuck indoors exercising and need something to watch, and aren’t put off by the odd bit of ultraviolence, I definitely recommend this. And I hope they make another season of it, for some future time when the weather turns crappy.
I had meant to write something more substantial today, but a different thing came up, so you get this while I wait for the kids’ bedtime. Here are some buttons:
And if you want to talk more about the show, the comments will be open.