Thanks to the predictability of the parental gift list which comes in every Christmas, I’d always mentally filed Lee Child’s series of Jack Reacher novels under ‘Mum’s stuff’ – kind of like a Cliff Richard of private investigations.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the new boxset series Reacher (Amazon Prime Video) landed last week, and proved to be a bone-crunching, tooth-rattling romp of vengeance.
With an added streak of murky black humour and the kind of whipcrack pacing you don’t often find in padded-out, overlong streaming series.
Sets its stall out quickly
Based on 1997’s Killing Floor, the first novel in Child’s series of more than 40, the show sets its stall out quickly and brutally.
Drifter Jack Reacher steps off a bus in the backwoods town of Margrave, Georgia, looking for the resting place of blues player Arthur ‘Blind’ Blake.
He’s quickly arrested for murder before he can take a bite of the local diner’s peach pie.
As Reacher and his bookish accountant cellmate Hubble try to avoid the inevitable attempts on their lives, we discover what we secretly knew all along.
The hulking Reacher, it turns out, fights like a human weapon, as we discover when he’s attacked in the prison toilets.
Then he gets out, and we find out he’s a skilful detective, a heavily-decorated ex-Major in the Army and a person with a link to the murder victim.
Built like a heavy wardrobe
He’s a fantasy figure, essentially, but showrunner Nick Santoro (who recently produced the streaming adaptation of The Fugitive, and has written for series like Prison Break and The Sopranos) keeps this conspiracy crime thriller just the right side of becoming a superhero movie.
In a casting move which seems a deliberate response to complaints from Reacher fans that Tom Cruise just wasn’t suited to the films, this time the character’s played by Alan Ritchson.
He’s built like a heavy wardrobe, but with a deceptively soft voice and a skill for curt humour.
As well as the perfect thriller pacing, the interaction between the three leads makes this show.
Great performances all round
Along with Ritchson’s Reacher, there’s Willa Fitzgerald’s capable but comparatively mortal local cop Roscoe Conklin, and Malcolm Goodwin’s Oscar Finlay, a black, Harvard-educated detective from the big city who’s inexplicably moved to the country.
Next to the inscrutable Reacher, the pair give the show heart and vulnerability.
While the violence and the sense of might-makes-right vengeance might turn off some viewers, Reacher is less Liam Neeson’s angry, straight-faced Taken, and more a throwback to the A-Team or Schwarzenegger films of the ‘80s, winking at the audience as he dishes out the punches.
Also highly recommended this week was This is Going to Hurt (BBC One).
It’s written by Adam Kay, based on his best-selling book, and stars Ben Whishaw as Kay himself, an overworked junior doctor who’s letting his 24/7 career ruin his life and his terminal lack of sleep ruin his career.
On the evidence of this first episode, it’s even more of a thriller than Reacher.
Adam trudges the hospital corridors, always on the move, throwing away set of scrubs after bloodstained set of scrubs, pulling babies free from stomachs, just waiting for the inevitable mistake to come.
For very different reasons to Reacher, it could shape up to be a modern classic.
