Prime Video’s “Reacher” is a little bit like comfort food — you know, if your comfort food involves the 6-foot-5-inch, competent-is-my-middle-name former Army major-turned-makeshift-crime-solver Jack Reacher saving the day through a delightful mix of brain and brawn.
You know what you’re going to get: stellar action sequences, witty dialogue, charming performances and a lot of star Alan Ritchson mean-mugging the camera. And Season 4 delivers exactly that, proving that the “Reacher” formula is still a winning one.
The latest season — which adapts “Gone Tomorrow,” the 13th novel in Lee Child’s “Reacher” series — never once lets up off the gas. It takes a mere three minutes before Reacher, who’s wandered into Philadelphia seemingly to enjoy cheesesteaks and the city’s public transit, finds himself embroiled in another thrilling adventure, one that involves a sudden suicide, a missing flash drive, government documents, a presidential hopeful, myriad kidnappings and murders, fisticuffs galore and a mysterious duo who aren’t what they seem.
It’s a lot to keep track of, and there’s rarely much downtime between story beats and brawls, but the pacing makes it so you never feel overwhelmed — just more interested in what revelation, or broken bone, comes next.
The adaptation follows the general contours of the source material, but it does make some major narrative changes, particularly settings — swapping New York City for Philly, Russia for Indonesia — and why exactly Reacher is being chased down after watching a government employee, Anna, kill herself. (I can never tell if Reacher is in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time.)
Even though the initial mystery doesn’t involve Reacher personally — “You should have minded your own business on that train,” he’s told more than once — his sense of justice won’t let him step away.
But it’s more than just that: It’s guilt, an emotion that permeates the entirety of the season. Reacher blames himself for not being able to stop Anna from taking her own life. But it’s her brother’s lament that proves more salient to the story. A scene-stealing Christopher Marquette plays Jacob, heartbroken and incandescently furious in equal measure, whose drive to know why his sister did what she did powers the story and serves as its emotional center.
Completing the main character triumvirate is Tamara (an excellent Sydelle Noel), a no-nonsense Philly detective who serves as a much-needed foil to the absurd Reacher and frantic Jacob. Not that she can stop the absurdity from happening, of course, because like previous seasons, Season 4 is stuffed full of it, including watching Reacher ride an elevator from underneath it, hanging by one arm and looking unfairly cool.
It always baffles me that anyone looks at Reacher and thinks, “Yeah, I can take him.” I see him pick up a pair of chopsticks and immediately know he’s not using them for eating takeout. (Spoiler alert: He does not use them for takeout.)
But their stupidity means we get to see Reacher in glorious brawls multiple times an episode, and anyone who appreciates a crunchy, kinetic fight scene is in for a good time — except in the overstuffed final episode, in which there are somehow too many fight scenes. Heresy, I know. That episode, for a few reasons I won’t spoil, is one of the few misfires in Season 4.
In the end, if you enjoyed previous seasons of “Reacher,” Season 4 offers more of the same. I keep waiting for that formula to start showing some cracks, for the familiarity to become less welcome, but it hasn’t happened yet.