Reacher review: Tom who? Lee Child's vigilante with a heart finally gets a live-action version worthy of his name
13.02.2022 - 13:17
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
How you feel about Reacher, the eight episode series telling the story of Lee Child's vigilante with a heart almost as big as his ham-like fists, can probably be determined by your feelings on the deaths of innocent bystanders in pop culture.
Growing up I remember a lot of outraged tabloid headlines about high body counts in action movies and, compared to those days when Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone might cut through dozens of people while wisecracking with an Uzi, I feel like modern TV and film takes a more measured approach.
But if you're not familiar with Jack Reacher it's probably important to know he's not really a 'measured' sort.
When, early on in the new Amazon Prime series, our eponymous hero says after a brutal atrocity that he's going to 'track everyone responsible down and kill them all' he's not messing around.
It's a testament to Child's writing that somehow you can get past that and see a man who's more hero than psychopath, even with a frankly startling number of bodies in his wake.
Jack Reacher, is a veteran military police investigator newly finding his feet back on civvy street.
He gets off a bus in the small town of Margrave, Georgia and is immediately arrested on suspicion of murder.
So now he's got to stay - to prove he hasn't done it and then, in classic Reacher style, to systematically hunt down the real perpetrators, like a shed-sized Sherlock Holmes, and bring them his own brand of justice - mostly with his fists and a series of improvised weapons.
Smallville's Alan Ritchson is our chiselled hero.
Forget Tom Cruise's celluloid Reacher - too short and too chatty by far - Ritchson's incarnation is a man who looks like a thoughtful yet angry bear, says little and hits people