Reacher, aka Jack Reacher from Lee Child’s novels and the Prime Video TV series, is a very, very, very big man. That’s his whole thing. He is played by Alan Ritchson presumably because a herd of cattle, the Empire State Building and the moon were unavailable.
In a counterintuitive move, Reacher was played in the film versions of Child’s novels by the teensy-weensy film star and to-scale action figure Tom Cruise, who could credibly live unnoticed in Alan Ritchson’s scalp, cleaning him like one of those birds that groom hippos.
Alan Ritchson could carry him around in a BabyBjörn. He should do that. I certainly wouldn’t try to stop him. Tom Cruise might try to stop him, but he’d probably end up in the BabyBjörn anyway.
Unlike Tom Cruise, weeping away there in the BabyBjörn, Alan Ritchson is not the most expressive actor. He moves down streets like an annoyed wall of beef (in other territories “Reacher” translates as “Wall of Beef”), swinging his arms like the booms of cranes, legs going up and down like pistons, darting his eyes around like Eagle Eyes Action Man, scowling like a toddler and literally saying things like “Told you so” to the people whom he concusses.
He barely acts. He doesn’t need to. All of his sentences have the same cadence and delivery, emitted from his expressionless, rectangular face, with each line going down a semitone for the final two words. If I was a director working with Alan Ritchson and I wanted him to add more emotion to his delivery I would probably say something like, “Carry on the way you are, Alan Ritchson. This is perfectly fine. Please don’t hurt me.”
Seriously. Would you ask a tsunami to express itself a bit more? Would you ask a continent to dig down into its motivations? Would you ask the sun to radiate with more nuance? Of course not.
Nonetheless, though this cautious approach to Alan Ritchson is warranted in real life, in Reacher the TV show he is constantly being hassled by toughs who think that his enormous arms and fists make him an easy mark.
Why can’t they leave poor ol’ Reacher alone? He’s just trying to have a quiet life, wandering from town to town like a weather system, eating gluttonously and listening to blues music (because even a truckful of prime steak needs a hobby), but he keeps getting drawn into local intrigues that he solves not with his mind so much as with his huge mitts.
He keeps coming to the aid of women in distress (they’re like sugar to him) and accidentally killing goons. There is a touch of Lennie and the rabbits from Of Mice and Men in the way Reacher keeps accidentally killing goons. Often when it would be more opportune to merely maim and then question a still-animate goon, Reacher ends up firing them through a window or crushing them to death between bookshelves so that blood spurts from their mouth.
Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher. Photograph: Prime
My favourite bit in any series of Reacher are the bits where Reacher hides the body of a goon in a terrible hiding place. (He puts one in some sort of rubbish-disposal system in the first episode of the new season.) “Baby Reacher, have you killed again?” I imagine Baby Reacher’s mother saying frequently as she unearthed another goon corpse from under the couch. I am available to write the pilot of Baby Reacher if any producers are reading.
[ Reacher review: Brawnier, badder and sillier than everOpens in new window ]
In the new series adult Reacher stumbles on a suicide that leads him into a conspiracy involving the CIA, a high-ranking Washington-based politician, an OnlyFans model and a white kitten. (At one point Reacher holds the kitten in his enormous arms much like a hunk in an Athena poster.)
The details aren’t the point, though, so don’t bother trying to follow them. The point is watching Reacher eat junk food and hunksplain the plot to each new character and for us to then gleefully shout “Kill ’em, Reacher!” as the violent wall of beef assaults goons.
Sometimes I watch this show and fantasise about beating Reacher in a battle of wits, but even in the fantasy he responds to my sophisticated repartee by picking me up and folding me until I can be stashed away in a drawer. Then I fantasise, instead, about being Reacher prolifically annihilating the goons who are hassling me – many of whom were, funnily enough, in my class at school.
This is essentially the point and appeal of programmes like this. Another name for Reacher would be What Crisis of Masculinity? or, possibly, I Don’t Need to Go to Therapy or, maybe, My Ancestors Hunted Their Own Food, But I Am Proficient in Microsoft Excel.
Lanterns (HBO Max and Now) is a superhero show about space cops. It’s part of the wider DC superhero universe that kicked off last year with James Gunn’s Superman movie. The cleverest thing Gunn has done with the whole endeavour is to skip the overfamiliar origin stories – Batman losing his parents, Spider-Man being bitten by a radioactive spider, Iron Man being bitten by a radioactive iron, Hawkeye going to archery classes – that, for some reason, previous generations of film-makers never got tired of retelling.
Lanterns: Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler as John Stewart and Hal Jordan. Photograph: John P Johnson/HBO
This is a universe already populated by superheroes and with, it’s implied, a whole history of stories that may or may not be told some day.
[ Superman review: Utterly charmless. And as funny as toothacheOpens in new window ]
Lanterns was created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King, and it’s about the superhero Green Lantern, aka Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), a gruff, secretive and irresponsible man with a power ring gifted to him by an intergalactic police force. John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) is his younger, hungrier and more straightlaced future replacement.
This bickering duo are, before the first episode is over, investigating an alien-adjacent murder in rural Nebraska possibly involving bigoted anti-alien militia members. At least in the first episode, they forgo the silly costumes and specially-effected superheroics in lieu of something earthier (bar fights, on-foot chase sequences and superpowers used to light cigarettes and open beer bottles).
Some people have likened the show to True Detective, which I think might be doing it a bit of a disservice, because True Detective is a humourless show and this has plenty of humour woven in.
Tonally it reminds me more of shows like Furious and The Lowdown and Happy Valley, which can somehow contend with darkness while acknowledging something lighter coexists with it.
If I had one criticism – and this might just be because I’ve been watching Reacher – it’s that neither Kyle Chandler nor Aaron Pierre is enormous enough. But it’s very entertaining if you can contend with teensy-weensy people who haven’t yet killed even one goon.