Title: Reacher
Rating: 4 Stars
The Reacher series of novels by Lee Child have been running for a very long time. He’s up to number twenty-six, with a dozen or two other short stories as well.
I’ve read all of the novels and the short stories. On the one hand, there’s nothing particularly innovative about the series. Jack Reacher is a retired military police officer. He’s huge, fearless, and very smart. Since he’s been retired from the military, he has just been wandering around the country. In the earlier novels, his hallmark was that he just carried his toothbrush. Whenever his clothes got dirty or torn, he’d head off to the nearest surplus store, buy new clothes, and throw away his old ones.
Whenever he enters a new town, he’d witness some wrong that needed to be rectified. Sometimes he witnessed a kidnapping, sometimes an extortion attempt, or maybe something that just seemed a little off (eg why would a hard earned West Point ring have been pawned?). He’d poke his nose into the business, violence would ensure, people would die, and justice would be reinstated. Once done, he’d be at the edge of town again, either hitchhiking or waiting for the next Greyhound to destinations unknown.
As I’ve said, this pattern is not new. Think of Caine from the old Kung Fu series, the Man with No Name in the Spaghetti westerns, or even the Lone Ranger. A town is under siege, an anonymous avenger sweeps into town, resolves the situation (brutally and without remorse) and then leaves. To the town folk, these characters are the ultimate deux ex machina.
Even if not new, Lee Child is quite adept at writing them. His situations are always interesting and he writes in the propulsive manner that the genre demands. It’s not unusual to consume a 400 to 500 page novel in a day or two. He also manages to keep Reacher interesting. He’s kind of a thinking man’s action hero. In one of the novels, his nemesis gives him the nickname Sherlock Homeless, which is actually a quite apt description of him.
Even so, the latter novels have not been great. Hard core Reacher fans had been beginning to complain that the Reacher novels were becoming less action packed. In some novels, he did seem to emphasize Reacher’s mental abilities over his physical prowess. Although that didn’t bother me, I could see where those critics were coming from.
For the last several novels, Child has teamed up with his younger brother, Andrew Child (note: both names are pseudonyms). Since he’s not getting any younger, maybe Lee is thinking of transitioning the franchise to Andrew. The result of doing so has restored the action to the Reacher novels. However, in so doing, Reacher has become something of a invincible terminator figure.
For a series that has run this long, that was always going to be a problem. You know that Reacher can’t die but you have to put him in what appears to be imminent dangerous peril. This is a hard trick to pull off over the long haul. Child was able to do so in the earlier novels by emphasizing some of Reacher’s weaknesses. For example, he has tendencies towards claustrophobia. In one fight, he realizes that his opponent is a better, strong fighter than him and prepares to die. Several novels comment on his lack of driving skills.
In the last couple of novels, none of those vulnerabilities are on display. Problems seem to be at best minor inconveniences to him. He dispatches many bad guys without apparently breaking into a sweat. As a result, although I’ll continue to read the novels, I don’t look forward to them with the anticipation that I used to.
There have been two Reacher films. Fans of the novels were aghast at the casting of the diminutive Tom Cruise in the titular role. Yes, even though Cruise is not an imposing presence, he did pick up and communicate the deadpan sense of humor of the Reacher novels. Reacher is (nearly) always the smartest, strongest, and meanest man in the room. Knowing that, he talks with an absolute confidence that is quite amusing. So, I was actually OK with Cruise as Reacher. The first film was good. The second was less so.
This brings us to the Amazon Prime series. The first season is broken up into eight parts, all of which are 45 minutes to an hour long. It’s a retelling of Child’s first novel, The Killing Floor. In this novel, the stakes are higher because, in a small town in Georgia, it’s Reacher’s brother Joe that has been murdered.
Let’s start with the actor playing Reacher. Alan Ritchson certainly addresses the Cruise size concern. Ritchson is massive. He is tall and broad. I don’t know how much was done via casting or camera work, but he towers over everybody else. Regarding his acting, it’s hard for me to judge. I’m not aware of seeing him in any other role. At best, his performance can be described as wooden or stolid. Normally, those wouldn’t be great adjectives to describe an actor’s performance. However, especially in the earlier novels, Reacher is at best coldly dispassionate. He has his own moral code that occasionally does not line up well with society’s conventional code. If someone is a bad guy, then he has no problem shooting them in the back and feels no compunction to feel particularly bad about it. So, as a character, playing Reacher as stolid and dispassionate could very well be an actor’s choice. Or possibly that is Ritchson’s acting style and it just meshes with the character.
Since the series does span at least six hours, this does give them the opportunity to fully flesh out the novel. It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but it seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation. For some reason that’s not clear to me, they changed the bad guy to be a family member of the bad guy.
At times, the pacing was just a bit languid. I’m guessing that they made some kind of episode commitment to HBO. They could have probably thinned the run time down an hour or so and it would have been a tighter piece.
They’ve also fallen into the trap of making Reacher seem superhuman. He drives dangerously fast like a stunt man. He sprints at high speed (in the novels, it was explicitly stated that, due to his bulk, that he could not run fast). At one point, he seemed to pretty effortlessly know his way around electronics. It’s hard for a character to be vulnerable if they have no weaknesses.
To sum up, if you’re a long time fan of the Reacher novels, I’m guessing that you’ll be satisfied with this series. If you watch the series and you found yourself entertained, you’ll probably enjoy the Reacher novels (focus on the earlier ones first).
dorkenstein 