“Reacher” has been a huge hit for Prime Video, with season 3’s Rotten Tomatoes score proving to be as unstoppable as star Alan Ritchson himself. It’s not hard to see why the show has done so well when it’s essentially just a massive action hero rampaging around the United States hitting bad guys and bringing justice to the overlooked and downtrodden. But while the character might seem like a fairly simple action archetype, Ritchson, who’s currently shooting “Reacher” season 4, doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
In an interview with Cinelinx, Ritchson was asked whether Reacher is a good guy, and had a surprisingly nuanced answer. “Whether or not [Reacher]’s the good guy or bad guy is not so black and white,” he said. “It’s too complex to say that. In whose eyes are we talking about? In the eyes of the law, I think he’s a bad guy; he’s got his own set of rules.” Indeed, Jack Reacher has never been one to follow the law, offing bad guys left and right without a care across three seasons of the popular streaming series. But in his eyes, it’s all part of an unquestionably moral mission.
As Ritchson went on to say, “I think [Reacher] would say he’s doing the right thing whenever he’s doing it, but there may be a high body count attached to that.” That’s certainly the case in every season so far, with Ritchson’s ex-military policeman killing off dozens of faceless thugs. But often, these kills skirt the line between necessary and questionable. In season 3, there’s a particularly egregious example where Reacher kills an associate of Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall) named Angel Doll (Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz) for asking too many questions and almost blowing his cover. But at the point Reacher brutally kills the poor guy, he hasn’t really done anything that can reasonably justify Reacher’s actions. The fact that he kills him by slamming his head onto a receipt spike before manhandling his body and stuffing it under a desk just makes the whole thing worse. As such, it’s not always clear just how good a guy Reacher actually is. As far as Ritchson is concerned, that’s all part of the show’s allure. “It’s debatable. If it’s hard for us to answer that question, I think we’re doing something right.”
Is Reacher really a good guy? Or a bad guy in disguise?
One of the main features of Jack Reacher, who was created by author Lee Child, is that he simply can’t tolerate any kind of injustice, and in both the books and the streaming series, the character has demonstrated that several times.
Not only has Alan Ritchson’s hero taken down arms dealing operations and uncovered small town conspiracies, he’s also taken time out from his main missions to right some perceived wrong. During the first season of “Reacher,” he departed from his mission to uncover the truth behind his brother’s murder to save a dog from an abusive owner. In season 3, which broke Prime Video records, he casually takes out two random goons over coffee simply because they were being disrespectful to a maid. In that sense, Jack Reacher is seemingly so committed to standing up for the little guy that he’s willing to do whatever it takes.
But as multiple examples throughout the series have shown, it’s not always that clear whether he’s going too far. That said, this is a ridiculously pulpy show about a man with a lot of muscles killing dudes for our amusement, so a case could be made that analyzing the depth of such a series perhaps isn’t the ideal way to consume “Reacher,” even if Ritchson thinks we should. But don’t worry: /Film will be doing plenty of analysis of “Reacher” season 4 when that hits Prime Video.
