Amazon Prime Video will host the latest adaptation of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher book series, titled appropriately, Reacher. Set to release on February 4th 2022, the series will have 8 episodes of about 52 mins.
Reacher Season 1 Cast
- Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher
- Willa Fitzgerald as Roscoe Conklin
- Kristin Kreuk as Charlie
- Malcolm Goodwin as Oscar Finlay
Reacher Season 1 Plot
A veteran military police investigator who had taken a trip down the civilian path had soon been tangled into a murder case where he was the accused.
Reacher Season 1 Review
No action or thriller series is complete without a grimly beaten up scene as the first shot. The shock value of the entire story somehow rides on the first 2 minutes, followed by the next minute being a contrastingly bright sunny scene. Storms don’t necessarily need warnings but if a murder series has a scene with more than 3 bright colours then the main character is in trouble.
Reacher has big shoes to fill, especially Alan Ritchson. Tom Cruise was a beloved Jack Reacher who played the role in two films. Fortunately for the new Reacher, he is already a mighty structure of a man so, in terms of accuracy of character, he has genetics backing him up. The voice acting and the performance, on the other hand, is underwhelming. Ritchson was dull when he was not acting. Whether he was angry or flirtatious, there was no telling.
While showing his skills as a veteran military police investigator to Malcolm and listing down everything he noticed about the detective, he had next to know emotions, making him more Sherlock than anything else. Reacher, compared to Sherlock has a lot more emotion and in that specific scene with Oscar Finley, Alan’s Reacher was making a point and trying to one-up the Harvard educated detective.
The entire cast apart from Oscar Finley was imitating someone or the other. Willa Fitzgerald was Zoey Deutch playing a police officer. If they are not imitating they are asking questions like “Do you have a problem with me killing people?” if this is a question someone asks a police officer I will question their common sense.
The one cliché that never fails is when only one room is left in the hotel and then the main characters are required to share. Somehow the show messed that up too. The trope is called the one-bed trope, and that should not be messed up with. Simply a matter of integrity. Everything in the show was rushed, there was no chemistry and thus what was supposed to be relatively gradual progress just felt out of place.
This show furthers the point that remakes of burly men trying to solve a mystery that is not really his responsibility will always be made with lesser thought than the previous. Is it necessary to have any more movies of Jack Reacher? No. these movies promote the idea that a man can disrespect a woman in the profession and then say something romantic and get away with it. Aren’t we past this? Let the female police officer fight her own fights!
A Few Good Things about Reacher
Let’s back up to their flashbacks. The nostalgic cinematography was better than everything else happening in the series. There were so many elements that were always left unexplained. I would comment on the sound score but that felt like a bigger mystery than the plot. Apart from the actual physical violence in the show, there was no action. He touched active rail lines and didn’t get an electric shock. If throughout the series the question of why arises and it has nothing to do with the story, then it is not a good thriller.
One of the few things that were good in the series was the cinematography, the sets and the few sneaky good dialogues. Wonder when some episodes had a comparatively better performance. I would say something about the costume department but from everything that the show had, it was pretty decent. Even the choice of locations and the barren stretch of land near the police station was smart. It gave the look that the police station was a part completely different from the mess of the town. In terms of seeing and saying, the series relied a lot on the saying. We were told that XYZ person was not trustworthy or that the plan was going to shambles. Knowing that the scenery of the series was apt in communicating subtler parts of the story, it could have been used to remind the audience of the elements instead of repeating them again and again.
The plot was repetitive. Firstly, the entire idea is done and over with, so in a larger sense the series had nothing new to it. Secondly, even in a narrower sense, the plot lines, the relationship dynamic or the smaller themes, within themselves would get repeated through the episodes. It was restating itself so many times that if I missed 20 minutes of an episode, I would not be lost at all.
Similar to all small-town mysteries, this too had the elite and rich bullying the public police officers into not punishing their sons for vandalism and the protagonist becoming a modern Robin Hood. Not to lie, even after everything missing I still wanted to finish the series. Mixed with how bad could it get and will the end be the same as the book. The accents came and went. There were times when each of the characters had a thick, what seems like a southern accent and there were phases where that just disappeared. While I won’t tell you about the accuracy of the book, I will tell you that whether you leave it or not, the satisfaction level will always be the same.
The Movie Culture Synopsis
Do not watch the show if you respect murder mysteries. If you can watch a show without focusing much on the performance, chemistry or the dragging then the show might be decent after all. The moral of this series is that the Reacher adaptations need to stop.
