When Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) promises something, he delivers—and in season four of Prime Video’s Reacher, that’s often violence of an exceedingly brutal order.
Once again serving as judge, jury, and executioner in a story that also allows him to be the valiant, uncompromised champion of the little man and enemy of The Man, Ritchson’s hero is a hulk tailor-made for righteous vigilantism.
He’s a David with the body of a Goliath, and a perfect role for the star, who’s taken aim at America’s own powers-that-be, accusing President Trump of being a pedophile and raging that “this f---king guy is just raping the world that he lives in for whatever gain he personally can have, and I’m supposed to let that go?”
In the crime-fighter’s latest outing, he finds himself mired in a mystery that provides plenty of opportunities to break limbs, crack skulls, and—in one particularly nasty moment—tear a guy’s ear off by pulling his head through a jail cell’s bars. Based on Gone Tomorrow, the thirteenth book in author Lee Child’s best-selling series, Reacher (August 12) follows the formula that’s turned it into the streamer’s most reliable dad-core hit. The nomadic Reacher arrives in a new locale, involves himself in a puzzling case that’s far more complicated than it initially appears, and acquires a collection of like-minded do-gooders to aid him in his quest to bring the villainous to heel.
To do that, Reacher—a former U.S. Army military police officer—sidesteps the courts and takes matters into his own gigantic hands. His unapologetic murderousness is— along with his enormous size and robotic I-know-best attitude—his defining characteristic.
Reacher’s disinterest in anything but his unimpeachable version of the truth and justice is the primary source of humor in Reacher, which this time around features an amazingly convoluted narrative whose particulars are so difficult to keep straight that its later episodes devote multiple scenes to characters simply laying out precisely what’s happened.
It begins with Reacher leaving a bar at night in Philadelphia, buying a cheesesteak, and heading to the subway. On the train, he notices a woman whose distraught fidgetiness suggests to him that she’s a suicide bomber. She’s not, although Reacher’s attempt to stop her from taking drastic action (by claiming he’s a cop) fails when she fatally turns a gun on herself.
Reacher is brought in for questioning by officers Shaun Docherty (Kevin Corrigan) and Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel), who know that he isn’t responsible and yet feel obligated to take him to task. They’re not the only ones—federal agents grill Reacher about this incident, and in typically droll fashion, he nicknames them Snap, Crackle, and Pop and blows them off as B-team flunkies.
Nonetheless, he gets intel about the victim, a federal government employee named Anna Merrick (Karen Kwong-Chip) who’s suspected of giving something to Reacher before she took her life. On the street after these interrogations, Reacher is attacked by a couple of henchmen who clue him into what Anna was carrying—a flash drive—and then get knocked out by the giant.
Reacher has no horse in this race, but his guilt over not preventing Anna’s suicide compels him to stick (and sniff) around. During the course of this undertaking, he meets Anna’s brother Jacob (Christopher Marquette), a small-town New Jersey cop who wants answers to this baffling calamity, and partners with Tamara, whose lowly police-department position is due to her rankling her corrupt superiors’ feathers (making her a kindred spirit to Reacher).
Thus, a makeshift noble trio is born, with Reacher establishing the season’s character dynamics with a swiftness that’s a tad cutting-corners silly but keeps the proceedings efficient and propulsive.
Everyone, it seems, wants to recover Anna’s enigmatic flash drive, including the CIA—whose goons are regular Reacher punching bags—and an Indonesian woman named Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo) who says that it contains military information proving that she’s the love child of Delta soldier-turned-presidential candidate congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas).
Even before Jacob can label her a “smokeshow,” Lila comes across as Reacher’s obvious love interest du jour, and their coupling (as well as two other brief scenes) allow for droolworthy shots of an unclothed Ritchson, whose massive physique is so pro wrestling-worthy that it’s fitting when his late heroics involve a flying shoulder maneuver that’d be right at home in a WWE ring.
What follows is a byzantine conspiracy concerning torture, OnlyFans models, sex scandals, kidnappings, secrets about America’s military involvement in the Philippines, and an independent journalist (Kevin Weisman’s Russell Plum) who, like Reacher and Tamara, is a pure-hearted loner who was wronged by higher-ups for trying to expose their misdeeds.
Showrunner Nick Santora doesn’t alter the series’ template, with Reacher saved by convenient twists and each episode energized by knock-down, drag-out skirmishes that allow the protagonist to demonstrate—to audiences and to the adversaries who foolishly think they can compete with him—that he’s an unstoppable homicide machine fueled by virtuous rage, guilt, and honor.
By not seriously deviating from its own conventions, Reacher is too comfortable in its fourth outing, and that goes for Ritchson as well. By now, the actor has proven himself an entertainingly stoic, levelheaded battering ram of a crusader, and he continues to lace his performance with moments of grim badass comedy that contribute to the material’s semi-cartoony tone.
Nevertheless, it’s a familiar routine that, at this point, requires more novel circumstances than these to stay fresh. Most situations in this tale are minor speed bumps, and by the time the show has Reacher give a heartfelt speech about facing death by staring it in the eye—a courageous proclamation undone by the fact that he’s obviously not dying—it’s lost any real sense of danger or surprise.
As the bruiser’s sidekicks, Marquette is serviceable as the apparent in-over-his-head wimp who’s actually up to the task at hand, and Noel is suitably tough and determined as the disillusioned law enforcement officer who’s itching to once more make a difference. Both, however, are just two-dimensional pawns in a schematic game that’s most notable for its absurd intricacy.
As always, Reacher’s main attraction is its title character, whose no-nonsense bravery, intelligence, and muscle make him a magnetic force with which to be reckoned. Still, with merely a few tweaks to its tried-and-true recipe, this season—no matter Reacher’s superhuman ability to withstand punishment and keep on killing—boasts the series’ first real signs of wear and tear.
