The Bad Guys The ‘Reacher’ Isn’t Allowed To Fight

The fourth season of Amazon Prime’s “Reacher,” adapted from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, finds our hulking hero (Alan Ritchson) ensnared in a government conspiracy in Philadelphia, all while trying to get his hands on a cheesesteak. “People keep telling me to mind my business,” he dryly observes, with the CIA and a small army of assassins on his tail. The season begins with Reacher intervening when he suspects a woman aboard the subway may be a suicide bomber. She is suicidal, though there is no bomb; when he approaches her, she shoots herself.

Season 4 specifically adapts Child’s 2009 novel “Gone Tomorrow,” with one curious contortion. The novel’s villains are ultimately revealed as an al-Qaeda cell, their conspiracy rooted in the Soviet-Afghan War and America’s appropriately anti-communist dealings with the mujahideen. The streaming adaptation strips away those jihadist roots in favor of Indonesian assassins, an illicit CIA operation, and a conveniently apocalyptic chemical weapon. There is, eventually, a suicide bomber flown in from Djibouti, but the show barely troubles itself to give him a motivation. Is The Daily Wire now the only place one can still find a good old-fashioned story about an American hero thwarting Islamist terrorists?

In Reacher’s usual antics, his altruistic tendency to meddle lands him in a local police precinct, where he meets the downtrodden Detective Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel) and Jacob Merrick (Christopher Marquette), the police officer brother of the subway victim. Pairing Reacher’s blunt, extrajudicial methods with local cops unaccustomed to his peculiar brand of problem-solving is familiar territory for the series.

Merrick gives the formula some life. Comically dwarfed by Reacher, who somehow appears to grow larger each season, Merrick nevertheless carries the moral burden of avenging his family with convincing desperation. He cannot fight, intimidate, or bulldoze his way through a room, so he simply sticks to Reacher like a fly, determined to help however he can.

As the mystery unfurls and a group of tenacious CIA agents hounds the trio, Anna Merrick’s suicide is traced to Indonesian militants, American special forces, and a covert 1990s weapons program. This is roughly where the plot begins to lose its grip. Lila Hoth (Agnez Mo) and Amisha Hoth (Anggun) are hunting a flash drive containing the formula for a chemical weapon developed during an American operation in Indonesia. What had been a conspiracy grounded, however luridly, in recognizable history becomes a succession of secret programs, buried atrocities, and invented geopolitical grievances requiring increasingly elaborate exposition merely to keep the machinery moving.

We are repeatedly told that Reacher possesses a formidable investigative mind to accompany the mammoth physique. Yet by the third episode, he is being wooed by Lila like a hormone-fueled high schooler. “I’d never forget a face like that,” he tells Tamara. Soon he is sleeping with Lila.

Perhaps having Reacher bed an al-Qaeda operative carried less Hollywood luster than casting an Indonesian pop star, but the romance makes him look uncharacteristically stupid. Our alleged chiseled Columbo begins resembling a bawdy meathead who struggles to read the instructions on a frozen dinner. In another scene, an adorably naive Reacher learns what OnlyFans is and decides that “society’s gone to sh*t.” Had his Indonesian muse been on the site, Reacher would be sprinting for a prepaid Mastercard.

Where Reacher has lost his wits as a detective, he has more than compensated as an executioner. This is the veteran vigilante at his most violent. He tears an ear off a CIA agent, feeds a mercenary’s hand into a commercial shredder, and decapitates another adversary with an elevator. There has always been a line separating Reacher’s pragmatic elimination of threats from mindless sadism, a distinction to which Season 4 seems blithely indifferent.

By the finale, the conspiracy has grown so convoluted that entire stretches are devoted to Reacher and company fleeing the police, the CIA, and assorted branches of law enforcement. We are no longer entirely sure who is who, only that they are all chasing Reacher. It culminates with his toughest opponents yet: two petite Indonesian assassins wielding karambits. Their dialogue reaches its nadir with Lila’s immortal line: “I don’t know what I enjoy more, f*ing you or killing you.”

The writing would be easier to forgive if the conspiracy carried any historical or emotional weight. “Gone Tomorrow” at least tethered its absurdities to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. Amazon replaces that specificity with a fictional Indonesian atrocity and a superweapon hidden in the background of an old photograph. Prime’s own “Jack Ryan” managed to tackle Islamist terrorism without apparent difficulty. Here, the effort to sanitize Child’s premise leaves the season with bigger explosions and smaller stakes. By the time Reacher is struggling to contain two knife-wielding pop stars, the whole thing feels strangely inconsequential.

***

Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org