Prime Video’s Reacher Delivers More Action-Packed Escapist Fun in Immersive Second Season

We’re almost a month past Thanksgiving, but it’s time for some gratitude anyway: I’m thankful for all the times the character Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) is given the opportunity to deliver a righteous ass-kicking to the scum of the Earth. Even when he’s not on the job—sometimes, especially when he’s not on the job—he can’t walk down the street without some real honest-to-God low-life forcing him to go medieval. I can go years without having a truly tense encounter in public, but for Reacher, it has perpetually been zero days since he was last antagonized. I’m not sure how good this is for Reacher himself (he seems pretty well psychologically insulated, I think), but it’s absolutely great for me, because watching Reacher beat the hell out of someone is the vicarious experience of a lifetime, and I want to consume as much as I can stomach. The fact that the bad guys have absolutely no nuance—it’s always some loathsome ogre from central casting beating up a woman or threatening a kid—is even better, because while I’m forced to consider gray areas in real life, I fervently do not want that shit when it’s Reacher time.

In its second season, premiering today on Amazon Prime, Reacher proves once again that it’s not just a good show, but a great one. Eleven stars out of five. It is also—obviously—a really bad one. But its badness is absolutely flawless, ultimately only contributing to its greatness.

An example that won’t spoil too much: in an early episode this season, there comes a moment when Reacher and his crew have to guess a dead colleague’s password. The catch is, they only have two minutes and three guesses before the disk drive they’re trying to access destroys itself. That’s when Reacher, thinking quickly in the heat of the moment, delivers the funniest line of the season:

“Passwords come from deep down.”

No, dude—unless you’re an idiot, they’re a random string of letters, numbers, and symbols. Even the oldsters these days know to tack on a few digits to their grandson’s name. But in the Reacher universe, a password is a single word that comes from the heart, and after two failures, they figure out that it has to be the single entity the dead man revered the most. The payoff is superb, wonderful, hysterical: the password is “Reacher.”

We’re in, baby.

If all of this sound steeped in irony, it kind of is, but I’m dead serious in my praise too. It might look easy, but making an entertaining-as-hell show about male fantasies of retributive violence is not easy, or everybody would be doing it. I haven’t read the Reacher books, but I have no doubt my conclusion is the same—it’s probably not great literature, but it takes a certain kind of talent to write, and if any simpleton could do it, they would. Prime’s version of Reacher is aesthetic perfection, a dynamic balancing act that never tries to be more than what it should be, and that always manages to hit the sweet spot. I’m not saying it’s only for dudes, but I think we’re in safe territory saying it’s mostly for dudes, because if you’re not locked in to exactly what Reacher is selling on some intuitive level, you will likely think, with some justification, that it’s hot garbage. I recognize the variety within the heart and brain of every human, and not to get too gendered about things, but there is a reason I don’t like Hallmark movies. Reacher is my Hallmark movie.

So what is it selling? What’s the secret sauce? It’s an extremely simple vision of justice that cuts through the complications of capitalism and the reality that even the most comfortable of us feel somewhat oppressed without knowing who’s doing the oppressing. There are very few chances to punch out our demons, and maybe on some level that stifles some expression of masculinity. This is not complicated stuff—we all want to be Reacher, unforgiving and tough but also beloved, a man of respect, a man who experiences his emotions strongly but quickly. If someone he loves dies, he stares out a car window with an expression that tells us he is feeling the absolute depths of pain, but we also know he’s going to be fine in about 30 seconds.

Do I want to get in fights? Hell no. I used to get in fights in elementary and middle school, and even when I won I would cry after because it sucks to hurt someone. Do I want to live an unattached life, wandering around with total freedom to be who I am? Please, please no. If you put me in a hotel room without my wife and kids, by the second night I’m covered in pizza crumbs and extremely sad. Do I want to walk around being hero-worshiped by my friends regardless of what I do, lusted after by literally every woman, and feared by my enemies? Yeah, obviously. But also, in real life, no.

But do I want to watch some ridiculous and extremely well-made depiction of this fantasy? More than anything.

I’m realizing at this point that I’m so into the idea of Reacher that I haven’t even mentioned anything practical about the show itself. First, we tip our caps to Reacher himself, Alan Ritchson. He’s huge, he’s jacked, he’s stoic, he’s smart, he’s sort of funny, and there is just a fractional amount of physical stiffness and emotional awkwardness about him that makes the performance even better. Tom Cruise was good as Reacher, no doubt, but Ritchson is getting straight to the heart of what this character should be. This goes right down to the sex scenes, which are fascinating to me because they are so resolutely unsexy; it’s practically chaste, like they’re ticking a box but acknowledging that actually, sex plays only a very small part in this particular male fantasy, so we’re just going to show you the very, very beginning of an interaction that, if we let it play out, would be one of the worst sex scenes of all time.

Second, we must acknowledge the direction. Season 2 is more northeast urban than the small-town southern aesthetic of Season 1, but there’s a similar gray seedy undertone that unifies the vision, and it’s a tribute to the efficiency and skill of their choreography that all of the actors seem pretty good to me, even though they’re not really working with much. The actual story is absurd and doesn’t merit much description; just know it has plenty of gaping plot holes and logical flaws that you’ll be happy to ignore. This ain’t exactly John LeCarre, but again, it doesn’t have to be, and after each episode, I keep going back to the idea that a show this basic has no right to be as immersive and fun as it is.

Look, the more we know about the world, the less it seems like there’s any true justice out there, and it’s also an enormous bummer that nothing is simple. Reacher is not going to make the world a better place, but as escapism goes, to me it beats any of the stupid comic book drivel churned out by the movie factory every year. Those are fantasies for adults who have never grown up and want to exist forever in the amniotic simplicity of their childhood. Reacher is for those of us who have grown up, understand what the world is, don’t particularly like what we see, and want to live for a few precious hours in a world where all the right asses are kicked.

Reacher premieres December 15th on Prime Video. 

Shane Ryan is a writer and editor. You can find more of his writing and podcasting at Apocalypse Sports, and follow him on Twitter here .

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