Reacher

Reacher is dumb, breezy, pulpy, and it knows it. That’s the real secret to Santora’s sauce: He understands the violent disposability of airport thrillers like the kind Child writes, leaning into every arch plot point and Southern-fried villain with schlocky aplomb. But none of it works without Ritchson, who was practically born for this role.

Reacher 2.0 is cleverly plotted, perfectly paced and isn't short of depth.

What's for sure is that if you like the Reacher books, you'll like the Reacher TV show. The blend that marks the books—of brute force and dry wit, of rootlessness and personal loyalty, of animal savagery and human decency—is present and accounted for.

Amazon’s take on Reacher is as solidly made as he is and delivers the rollicking yarn as efficiently as the man himself can dispatch a Glock-wielding gangster.

Reacher is huge, pulpy fun and far classier than you might expect.

The series has a sly, puckish humor and inexhaustible bravado that more than makes up for some of the more ridiculous aspects of the plot. Reacher succeeds thanks to an abundance of charm, an interesting central mystery, a slew of exhilarating fight scenes, and dynamic performances and undeniable chemistry from Ritchson, Goodwin, and Fitzgerald.

Reacher the TV series doesn’t have the star power of the films that preceded it, but in many ways, it has the potential to be even more successful. By providing a deeper look into a complex character, Reacher could do for Jack Reacher what Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan did for its titular character in another Amazon series: take an existing franchise beloved by many in a fun new direction.

In a sea of television trying to feign the bombast, awe, and import of cinema, “Reacher” is an unfussy, slightly dopey salve. Sometimes all you want is a tight, little potboiler where an erudite caveman breaks people in two.

It’s not going to challenge your expectations, but it will fulfill them in a mostly satisfying way.

Fortunately for the series, [Alan Ritchson is] gifted enough—and has a sufficient sense of understated humor—to sell a Reacher-worthy combination of menace, cynicism and even grudging warmth. It's something that helps make the show one of the more watchable on TV, where there's certainly no shortage of crime series.

It makes for some solid twisty TV storytelling, and death often has a formidable gravity as things get personal for practically every character.

Under showrunner Nick Santora ("Scorpion"), "Reacher" doesn't suffer from any illusions about its objectives, serving up an unpretentious action series that's as much a course correction from the movies as an extension of them. Taken on those terms, this version of "Killing Floor" isn't a bad way to kill time. The only irony is that while Reacher has gotten bigger, it's the picture (or rather, the screen) that got smaller.

Reacher doesn't commit to that fun side of the character as much as it could. It's safely played to capture fans of Amazon's other popular Jack, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, and it should do the trick, but Reacher, which is a perfectly fine dad show but not a must-see, doesn't have aspirations to go much further beyond that.

Though this first series doesn’t end as strongly as it begins, Alan Ritchson showcases the right mix of acting chops and physical presence to successfully bring Lee Child’s hero to life.

Ritchson’s physique cuts the right figure, and he has the charm needed to split the difference between Child’s brutal Reacher and Cruise’s version, which replaced the conspicuous brawn with stealth and guile. ... The deficiency is Reacher himself, a character beloved for qualities that leave him ill-equipped to anchor a serialized drama.

So now we’ve had Jack Reacher adaptations that have been annoyingly uninterested in the source material and frustratingly over-faithful to the source material. I prefer the Amazon version, and I wouldn’t mind another season, but I’d probably still rather read another book.