UN-INCREDIBLE HULK
WITH JACK Reacher, size matters — but it also isn’t everything. Starting in 1997, Lee Child authored two dozen thrillers starring Reacher, a retired Army investigator who now lives as a hobo, wandering from town to town and finding trouble along the way. He’s a brilliant detective, but also a six-foot-five-inch wall of muscle who draws eyes in every room he enters, and is the favorite in the many fights he gets into.
Hilariously, pocket-size movie star Tom Cruise insisted on playing Reacher in two films that more or less captured the character’s intensity and selfsufficiency. Cruise just lacked the mythical stature that most clearly distinguished Reacher from his action-movie peers and sleuthing counterparts.
Amazon’s new Reacher series basically gets the build right. Star Alan Ritchson is tall and swole enough to look plausible casually bursting out of a pair of flex cuffs. But whenever his shirt comes off (which is often), he has the definition of a man who spends four hours a day in a gym with a personal trainer, versus a slightly evolved caveman who came by his strength through scraps and brawls. Ritchson’s six-pack is a physical manifestation of a tonal problem: His Reacher is smarmy and pleased with himself, rather than casually secure in his abilities. He’s a generic vigilante who just happens to look like a mountain next to the small-town Georgia cops (played by Malcolm Goodwin and Willa Fitzgerald) who assist him in this maiden adventure.
The show also lacks the internal monologue in which Reacher is constantly doing the math to figure out where suspects may have gone and how best to injure the five men attacking him at the moment. This Reacher occasionally explains himself to others, but never in a way that makes him live up to the “Sherlock Homeless” nickname he has in the novels. And whenever Ritchson tries to show Reacher as stoic, he instead comes off as stiff and robotic.
The season is otherwise a relatively faithful adaptation of the first Reacher novel, The Killing Floor. But the books live or die on Reacher himself, rather than on the sometimes gimmicky plotting or Child’s fascination with torture and gore. If he’s not interesting, none of it is. That’s a big problem, no matter the leading man’s size.
A.S.