You’re not going to catch Alan Ritchson playing King Lear at Stratford or doing Noël Coward at Chichester, but as an implacable warrior for truth, justice and the American way – or what was once supposed to be the American way – he’ll be a hard act to follow. Built like the Incredible Hulk’s smarter brother, and equipped with an extraordinary capacity for busting out of apparently terminal predicaments, Ritchson is in the midst of turning himself into the embodiment of Lee Child’s wrong-righting hero, Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise had a go at the character in the movies Jack Reacher and Never Go Back, but, despite his many talents, little Tom simply didn’t have the required stature.
Amazon Prime’s first three seasons of Reacher have been monster hits around the globe, so expect plenty more (Child has written 30 Reacher novels so far, so this franchise could have decades to run yet). This fourth instalment, based on the novel Gone Tomorrow, kicks off dramatically with scenes of Reacher on a subway train in Philadelphia. A distressed-looking woman catches his eye, not least because she’s carrying a package which looks suspiciously like a bomb (Reacher’s back-story in the US military has equipped him with experience of this sort of thing). It isn’t, as it happens, but before Reacher can persuade the woman to tell him what the matter is, she whips out a revolver and, declaring that “no-one can help me”, shoots herself in the head.
This disturbing occurrence lights the blue touch paper on a chain of events which will lead Reacher off on a wild ride, where every lead he pursues is liable to hit a dead end or lurch off into unforeseen directions. Following the suicide of the woman we learn was called Anna Merrick, Reacher finds himself being quizzed by suspicious Philly cops who accuse him of murder. However, Reacher immediately grasps that even the cops can’t be stupid enough to believe he did it, and deduces that they are finding excuses to keep him in custody at the behest of some of some other authority (pictured above, Ritchson and Sydelle Noel as Officer Tamara Green).
Indeed, this is Reacher’s secret weapon – though he looks like (and in fact is) a giant lunk of muscle and sinew, he’s also astoundingly smart and perceptive. For instance, he’s able to reel off minutely detailed descriptions of all the other passengers who were on the fateful train with him. The cops have only identified three, but Reacher knows there were four, and remembers the fourth well enough to recognise him an episode or two later. The mystery man, it will transpire, is Noel Cahill, the Chief of Staff to congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas). The congressman may, or may not, have skeletons in his cupboard (eg a secret love child) dating back to his days serving overseas in the armed forces. He has eyes on the Presidency, and there are those who consider it imperative that he must be stopped.
All of this is mixed up with a classic MacGuffin, a computer thumb drive which various dodgy characters are desperate to get their hands on. The CIA are convinced that the late Ms Merrick had it and gave it to Reacher, but she didn’t. “Do you think we’re stupid?” demands a grumpy CIA man as they interrogate Reacher. “Yes,” he growls, before overturning a table and beating up all the CIA men in the room. Reacher is constantly finding new ways to subdue his antagonists, with slamming a guy’s head repeatedly into a stair bannister proving especially efficacious. Don’t try this at home!
We have yet to learn exactly what the lissome but enigmatic Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo, pictured above) is up to, but she lied to Reacher once and is probably doing so again. Especially since she’s a journalist… or so she says. By contrast, Russell Plum (Kevin Weisman) is an authentic paranoid gonzo reporter who’s obsessed with trawling the deepest recesses of the internet to unearth illicit government activities. And, it seems, the late Ms Merrick may have been something more significant than the lowly government Human Resources clerk we were led to believe…
- New episodes of Reacher are released on Prime Video on Wednesdays
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