Draft 7 of this review consisted, in its entirety, of one word: No. Because after the first six drafts I still didn’t know how to write my evaluation of this series in a way that didn’t give it more time and energy than it deserves. 

Then I realized that as badly as I wanted to do something cute like that it wouldn’t help to advise anyone reading the review. And I can do a better job of keeping fence sitters away from Reacher by actually doing my job.

The show is bad on every non-technical level. But the bad filmmaking isn’t the real issue here. The real issue here is bad intent. While the technical aspects of the show are expertly done (cinematography, fight choreography, sound editing etc…), Reacher is essentially devoid of any attempt to create art. It is completely, unapologetically soulless.

The main character is a physically perfect, morally perfect, Ultra-All-American, highly skillful universal expert. He has no flaws of any kind, and the story makes it clear that his level of personal perfection qualifies him to kill whoever he wants. He is essentially a robot, and his only discernable personality is getting angry when people don’t do exactly what he says. The only reason I can come up with for this is that they wanted this character to be a 100% pure audience surrogate. He exists solely for the male fans to project themselves into him and for no other reason. They’re not telling the story of Jack Reacher, they’re taking you on the Jack Reacher amusement park ride. And if that weren’t bad enough (it’s plenty) the show itself is a tonally schizophrenic, boring, stilted, predictable, cringy, oversimplified, boilerplate detective story.

Reacher is structured as a violent whodunit mystery. But tonally, it’s a nightmare child hybrid of NCIS style schlocky police procedural, and True Detective style gritty realism. Imagine someone mixing ketchup in with your milkshake and you get some idea of what I mean. These two things simply aren’t compatible and it makes the show borderline unwatchable to anyone who cares about the craft of filmmaking. 

But I do have to give it credit for novelty. Reacher is the only show I’ve ever seen that showed a savagely mutilated nude corpse crucified to a wall with nails, followed shortly after by one of the bad guys giving a Scooby-Do villain speech. Let that sink in for a minute. Seriously, go back and read this paragraph a couple of times because this is not an exaggeration. This actually happens in the show.

And if we were going for a horror motif (or horror comedy), or maybe an ultra-serious gritty mood, then that would work. Then it would actually add something to what was going on. But in this show I’m certain that the only reason they showed it is so that Jack Reacher can brutally kill the murderer later with a completely clean conscious. And since Jack Reacher is the audience surrogate, that means the real reason they’re doing it is so that the audience can enjoy killing the murderer later. But that wasn’t the point at which I turned it off. No, I stuck it out a full episode further. I turned it off, finally, after Reacher hooks up with ‘the girl’. I call her that because that’s why she’s in the show. Technically her name is Roscoe, and there’s enough going on that her character has some stuff to do, but the real reason she’s there is so Reacher can hook up. And even when they do, this still isn’t enough to make Ultra-Perfect-Robot-Man stop acting like an emotionless block of wood.  But given how the scene is set up it’s hard to blame him, or the audience, for not getting anything out of it. 

The event that inspires Roscoe (not Reacher) to instigate the aforementioned hookup is Reacher having a painful phone call with his dead brother’s grieving girlfriend (I know that would put me in the mood). Rosco is impressed with how he put the girlfriend’s feelings above his own and talked to her even though it was clearly the last thing on earth he wanted to do. And while this is the most emotion that Reacher has displayed, and it is at least an attempt at character development, there has been zero romantic chemistry between Reacher and Roscoe prior to this moment. They clearly like working together, but at no point prior to then did I get the impression that they were interested in each other that way. The moment wasn’t built up to at all, and so it didn’t mean anything when it happened. Maybe the show was trying to portray it as purely a product of that moment, but after their awkward morning-after conversation I threw up my hands and decided to stop torturing myself. The first four episodes of this eight-episode series did everything in their power to make me not want to watch the rest and they got their wish.

Fire this one into the sun where it belongs and do your best to forget that it ever happened.