Legendary The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously censured Dirty Harry for what she considered its fascistic vigilantism, and she’d undoubtedly have felt likewise about Reacher.
The protagonist of Prime Video’s hit adaptation of Lee Child’s novels is a hulking and murderous special-ops uber-detective hobo—think of him as a cross between Captain America, MacGyver, the Terminator, and Batman (as well as a one-man A-Team)—who proudly doles out lethal justice because he’s always the smartest, toughest, scariest, and noblest titan in the room. Judge, jury, and extreme-prejudice executioner, he’s a colossus with a self-administered license to kill and the virtue and smarts to justify it. That makes him a cruel and anti-democratic sort of do-gooder. Yet it also renders him a thrilling fantasy of might making right and of good triumphing over evil—a no-nonsense superhero who punishes the wicked with righteous fury.
Reacher is the platonic ideal of dadcore television, and it doesn’t stray from its chosen I-am-the-law template in its second season (Dec. 15). It does, however, improve upon it in every conceivable way. Based on Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble, the series’ latest go-round is a superior bruiser—fiercer, funnier, and with a better storyline, supporting characters, and villains. It’s an upgrade cast in an ’80s-’90s action cinema mold, and it solidifies headliner Alan Ritchson as both a perfect Reacher and the moment’s reigning He-Man. Standing six-foot-who-knows-what and 240-or-so pounds of gigantic pecs, enormous biceps, tree-trunk thighs, and washboard abs, he’s like an over-the-top cartoon come to life—all intense scowls, unwavering confidence, and bulging muscles. Rithcson’s intimidating presence (and ability to lace it with mordant humor) goes a long way toward establishing this series as one of the best things to happen to the beat-’em-up genre in decades.
Showrunner Nick Santora knows that Ritchson’s physical massiveness is the main selling point of Reacher, and he smartly leans into it. Every one of the season’s eight episodes boasts instances of Reacher—a former soldier, commander, and military policeman who now roams America with only his toothbrush, righting wrongs wherever he sees them—snapping limbs, firing guns, and generally mashing baddies to a bloody pulp. From the get-go, Santora sets a concussively exaggerated tone: Reacher spies NYPD officer Russo (Domenick Lombardozzi) watching him from an SUV and opts to neutralize him as a threat by stomping so hard on the vehicle’s front bumper, it triggers the driver-seat airbag, knocking the cop out. More jaw-dropping is when, during a later skirmish, Reacher breaks an adversary’s arm with a headbutt. He’s a human Mack truck who relishes murder and mayhem, and the fact that he also has the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes and the integrity of George Washington is hilarious icing on the cake.
Reacher’s first season was hampered by a tepid conspiracy (oh no, evil counterfeiters!), even lamer scoundrels, and two grating buzzkills in Malcolm Goodwin’s fish-out-of-water cop Oscar Finlay and Willa Fitzgerald’s bland love interest Roscoe Conklin. Aside from a brief cameo, both are MIA for this new tale, which relocates Reacher from generic rural Georgia to New York City and the tri-state area. There, Reacher learns courtesy of trusted comrade Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) that a member of their prior badass army unit (motto: “You do not mess with the Special Investigators!”) is dead, having been tortured and tossed from a helicopter. When Reacher and Neagley discover that additional members have also been assassinated, they assume that someone is intent on taking out their long-disbanded outfit and begin cracking skulls to get to the bottom of it. In the process, they reunite with their remaining Special Investigator partners David O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos), a cad-turned-dad who never stops wisecracking, and Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan), a sexy numbers expert who always shared sparks with Reacher—as well as gave him his mantra, “Details matter.”
The trail they follow leads them to A.M. (Ferdinand Kingsley), a posh arms dealer who’s using various aliases to move around the world. It also points them in the direction of Shane Langston (Robert Patrick), the head of security at an aerospace company that’s doing some nifty cutting-edge things with missiles. The who-what-where of it all, however, is somewhat secondary; Reacher provides lots of plot details, but they’re merely embellishments for its protagonist’s rampage of revenge, which, this time around, is complicated by the (not-very-convincing) notion that one of his Special Investigator buddies might be behind this nefarious scheme. Flashbacks to the unit’s heyday flesh out both these individuals’ rah-rah dynamics and Reacher’s unimpeachable instincts and ethics. But what often fuels the proceedings is Neagley, O’Donnell, and Dixon’s rapport with Ritchson’s goliath, whose fatal gung-ho tactics they frequently, incredulously comment upon—and, of course, embrace.
Whether it’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (which co-starred Patrick), Russo serving as the de facto barking-mad police boss from an ’80s movie (and being called out for it), or Reacher punctuating his final triumph with a prototypical kiss-off one-liner, Reacher hews to bedrock formulas during its sophomore outing. Its plot more propulsive, its dialogue snappier, and its brutality more brutal, it’s an impressively juiced affair that owns up to what it’s doing but never devolves into a wink-wink pantomime. Instead, Season 2 delivers the goods with gruesome brawniness. Ritchson is central to that, his scowl as steely as his comportment is menacing. While it’s not the most nuanced performance on television, it so ably hits its few notes—i.e., the sight of the actor threatening, manhandling and mauling enemies with unbelievable ferocity—that it proves electric.
Reacher imagines a world in which a nomadic ascetic homicidal giant with a keen intellect and a soft heart (not to mention a big appetite and distaste for modern music!) is the sole thing standing between civilization and chaos. It is not, let’s say, realistic, and Kael would have a field day with its celebration of vigilante slaughter as the surest path to justice. Taken on its own outlandish terms, though, it’s exactly what on-screen action should be: severe and yet somewhat silly, strapping but nonetheless streamlined. It’s got personality and flair to burn, and in Ritchson, this sophomore effort features a modern, larger-than-life behemoth fit for old-school carnage.
