‘Reacher’ Is a Brutal Thriller With a Void at its Center: TV Review

03.02.2022 - 22:49 / variety.com

Joshua Alston Know this about Jack Reacher: He’s an awfully tall drink of brackish water.No more than 10 minutes go by in “Reacher,” Prime Video’s series adaptation of Lee Child’s durable book franchise, without someone mentioning the eponymous character’s intimidating stature. Reacher, played here by Alan Ritchson (“Titans”), is described at various points as a “giant,” “Frankenstein’s monster,” and, without irony, as “250 pounds of frontier justice.” When characters aren’t conjuring turns of phrase to describe Reacher’s size, the camera is employing forced perspective techniques to render him even larger than the 6 feet 5 inches established in Child’s canon.The emphasis on Reacher’s physique is a good-faith gesture to fans of Child’s 26-and-counting novels, some of whom bristled at the pair of Reacher films featuring Tom Cruise as a featherweight version of the legendary bruiser.

And for diehards, that bit of corrective fan service should be enough to justify the series. But the other thing to know about Jack Reacher is that while he’s more than a juggernaut, he’s not that much more.

Which is to say, a serialized eight-hour series might be too much real estate for a Jack Reacher of any size. “Reacher” is technically an origin story, with creator Nick Santora faithfully reproducing Child’s debut “Killing Floor.” But, as in the novel, there’s not much origin to go over as Reacher arrives fully formed.

He’s an ex-military police investigator living lean off his pension who wanders about the country stumbling onto criminal conspiracies every thousand klicks or so. During a capricious stop in fictional Margrave, Georgia to learn more about a blues guitarist, Reacher winds up the main suspect in multiple murders, one of