Based (mostly) on the best-selling series of military techno-thrillers by the late Tom Clancy, five films have been made about the heroic CIA analyst, with four different actors portraying Ryan (two of which were failed attempts to reboot the series). Pour yourself a black coffee, sit back and enjoy.The Jack Ryan movie franchise has ran for 28 years and counting. It will please them endlessly but is still drawn broadly enough as a crime drama to attract others. It is great, great fun and will come as a great, great relief to the Reacher devotees who will surely – at least at first – form the bulk of viewers. Ritchson works alone.Īmazon’s take on Reacher is as solidly made as he is and delivers the rollicking yarn as efficiently as the man himself can dispatch a Glock-wielding gangster. Ritchson’s delivery (with just a flicker of knowing humour about the eyes) of these litanies of deduction on screen recall – gloriously – the heady days of Paul Gross doing similar monologues as Constable Benton Fraser in Due South, albeit with the slightly more surreal atmosphere of the show to help him sell it. In the process, he gets put in the bad part of a prison to await arraignment and must use his finely honed fighting skills to stay alive (to see Ritchson walking serenely out of a bathroom littered with bleeding bodies is to know a very special kind of peace), befriends a lady (Reacher is allowed one lady per adventure) and forges a mutually respectful alliance with the investigating officer who is reluctantly impressed by both Reacher’s intellect and street smarts, which combine to give him almost Sherlockian powers of deduction. And, when he finds out who has been killed, the matter becomes a personal “find everybody responsible and kill every last one of them”. Now he must stay in Margrave and prove he didn’t do it. But, again, for the uninitiated: our enormous hero gets off a bus (on a whim – this, and drinking black coffee, is what he does) in the tiny town of Margrave, Georgia, and is quickly arrested on suspicion of murder. If you have read Killing Floor, you now know – and this is a promise of delight, not disappointment – exactly what happens in it. The inaugural Reacher series is based, as is right and proper, on the first book in the novel sequence – Killing Floor.
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March 2023
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