Imagine, if you will, there’s a dude sitting around in his man cave or maybe just a basement he calls his man cave because it has an old pool table in it or something and he’s drinking his cheap sh*tty beer and watching sports on tv and seeing an ad for a new superhero movie and thinking…not another one of this dude, these dudes look stupid in their stupid tights, these dudes look totally gay (yes, his thoughts), what I want is a properly manly man superhero, someone I can secretly fantasize about being. It is from this mental onanism that Jack Reacher must have sprung, fully formed, and as ridiculously implausible as any superhero or potentially even more so.
Yes, that’s right, Jack Reacher is the jism of all manly men of underperforming masculinity everywhere that gained sentience. There’s no other way to explain this ludicrous mountain of a man. 6’5” 250 lbs of solid muscle. He’s never wrong. He never loses a fight. He always says the right things. He can track people by the most tenuous of suppositions and solve crimes by the most tenuous of stretches, but because every word he says is imbued with a sort of preternatural confidence, everyone listens to Reacher. And then we’re back to Reacher’s never wrong. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. He’s the American version of James Bond, meaning brutal and underdressed, among other things. He loves killing, never thinks twice about it, never has ANY moral qualms about any of his decisions. His inner life is subtle and restricts itself to a few memories here and there. His military past is clandestine and apparently involved obscene death toll numbers. Maybe Reacher isn’t Bond, after all. Maybe he’s Judge Dredd. A one-man investigative, judicial and executory force. Reacher needs no assistance. He’s here to assist you. If your small town is caught up in some evil machinations. Reacher will solve it and purify it. Mainly by killing all the evildoers involved. Reacher doesn’t believe in drawn-out court proceedings, Reacher believes in a frontier sort of justice. Reacher is good for the economy that way. Reacher cannot be stopped, not with pleas, not with force, and not with love, though plenty of women would try. Reacher is the kind of heroic protagonist around whom innocent people frequently wind up dead. It doesn’t faze him, doesn’t even give him a pause. He avenges them. Reacher is loyal to his old friends. Reacher is good to dogs. Reacher is built like Mr. Universe but is never seen working out. Reacher eats the crappiest of crap and never puts on a pound. Reacher travels light. Possessions offer Reacher no comfort. The man doesn’t own so much as a bag. Reacher can walk into any used clothing store or even a donation bin and walk out with perfectly fitting clothes, despite his unusually buff frame. Reacher only owns one change of clothing at a time and replaces it when he gets blood on it, which is frequently. Reacher washes his shirt du jour in the sink for the next day but neither his underwear nor his socks and this man gets a lot of physical activity during the day, meaning Reacher is a stinky boy. But no, Reacher’s sweat doesn’t stink – it wouldn’t dare. Reacher smells like a man, like a proper man that he is. Reacher’s neck is exactly as wide as his noggin’ and he makes it look natural. His biceps look like basketballs. His buttocks are like muscular watermelons. He is a physical perfection of a man, a moral perfection, a soldier/cop/justice system rolled into one. There isn’t an action movie stereotype that Reacher doesn’t take on and outperform. And he does it all in regular pants, not tights. You gotta love it. You can get it on tv, all eight episodes of that nonsense. Mind you, in its earlier cinematic reincarnation, Reacher was a positively diminutive presence as played by Cruise. And Lee Child, Reacher’s creator, was totally on board with that too, because, you know, cha-ching. Child’s Reacher appears to be a Dolph Lundgren doppelganger. But of course, there is only one Dolph and he doesn’t the popularity for a character like that, plus he’s much too old for it now. So, the creators of the tv show got the next best thing. Alan Ritchson is only 6’2” but is shot to look taller, plus given a shorter cast to work with. His musculature, though, is for real. Never a small guy to begin with, he got positively ripped for this role and he looks great. He is great in this role. Charismatic, fun, funny even, and very credible as an unstoppable brute force. He walks into a small town in Georgia only to find out that his estranged brother has just been killed there. What? What are the odds? Anyway…the local yokels aren’t likely to sort this out even if they are led by a Yankee named Finlay, Goodwin essentially resuming his role of Babineaux from I-Zombie and an absolutely adorable lady cop who to no one’s surprise is going to have the lovehots for Reacher. So, Reacher starts sorting this mess out himself, the body count starts climbing and the plot twists too, because apparently just about everyone is in on this. The plot is so convoluted, it’s difficult to care about it, but just looking at Reacher is strangely pleasant, he’s very nice to look at, he’s entertaining, you can watch his work his way through a phone book and be amused, probably. Which is good, because there’s really no other reason to watch this series unless as a testosterone supplement. Jack Reacher is an impossible fantasy, a thoroughly unreal character, but we live in the day and age where such things rule, as is exemplified by the obscene amount of superhero movies and shows out there. The appeal behind this is pretty obvious…people feel like they have no power. They want to at least watch power. Reacher has a lot of power. He is a Superman for people with no imagination and a killing appetite. He is a sign of times. He is an emblem of our times. It’s kind of tragic. But at least he looks good doing it – the it he does. And the world agrees, Amazon renewed the show for the second season almost right away. Long live the oversized muscles and suspension of reality.
2 Comments
Bjorn
2/27/2022 07:08:51 am
Great, funny review! I loved this series. However, you do make some great points. Haha..muscular watermelons.
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