Charlie and I are big fans of the Lee Child “Jack Reacher” franchise.
We’ve read many of the 25 books in the series while on vacation, recovering from an illness or surgery, or just wasting time until the next exciting phase of our life. The good guy always wins in the end, which is probably why we eat the stuff up. Besides, Reacher is a buff guy that men wish they were and women probably wish they could get into the sack.
The character of Jack Reacher is a loner, ex-Army MP inspector Major, who is built like the proverbial brick shithouse: 6’5” tall and 250 pounds of muscle. He’s also very smart: imagine Sylvester Stallone with brains.
There’s a new Amazon Prime series out now called “Reacher”. I binge-watched the series yesterday and today (all 8 episodes) while Charlie and her friend Sandy were having some fun in Las Vegas. It was pretty good; I will probably watch it again with Charlie because she will enjoy ogling Reacher (the actor) and I will know what’s coming and can act like Johnny Carson’s “Carnac the Magnificent”, predicting who the villains are. Hee, hee.
This isn’t the first adaptation of the Lee Child “Reacher” character. In 2012, and again in 2016, there were two “Reacher” movies that starred actor Tom Cruise in the lead. They were entertaining and Cruise did his normal Tom Cruise action figure best. However, the whole menacing Lee Child “Reacher” character was lost in the translation, as pipsqueak Cruise easily man-handled punks, thugs, and trained assassins with biceps as large as Cruise’s thighs. It seemed, in a word, unlikely. Particularly when bad guys had the drop on midget Cruise with guns, baseball bats, and such. For some reason, they took those opportunities to let “Reacher” disarm them or to make speeches before dispatching the hero. It never fails: the guy with the gun who gets talkative usually bites the dust.
I used to enjoy watching Steven Seagal movies before he got morbidly obese. The guy had a menacing presence and some moves, to boot. He could clear out a biker bar in less than a minute with his bare hands and make chop suey out of a gang of Bruce Lee wannabe’s armed with numchucks and katana knives. No problem for Seagal: he simply destroyed them with his Akido bullshit slap-fighting moves and chucked his attackers through windows and such. I think “Under Siege” was his best one, in which he rescued the U.S.S. Missouri and its crew from a mob of lunatic terrorists, thrusting a K-bar knife into Tommy Lee Jones’ cranium to conclude the festivities.
The funny thing about Seagal movies is that the bad guys never shoot him with their drawn guns but… it’s hard to believe… choose to go mano-a-mano with a very large Kung Foo master. It makes for good theater, if you like broken bones and maimed bad guys (which I do). But, after awhile (say about twenty Seagal movies), the plot gets old, particularly as Seagal has gained an extra hundred pounds which he tries to hide under huge garments. It would be cool if, just once, the cur holding the sawed-off shotgun on Seagal would pull the trigger. At this point, I’d pay admission for that, particularly since Seagal is the screwball buddy of Vladimir Putin in real life.
Anyway, back to Jack Reacher. The newest actor to play our hero is built just like the “Reacher” in the Lee Child novels and doesn’t seem as full of himself as did Mr. Cruise. As in most of the novels, “Reacher” finds himself at odds with local police from the get-go, despite being innocent of anything except being a hobo, and then must set things right in the community, one maimed bad guy at a time.
I hadn’t thought of it until now but that is how the Sylvester Stallone “First Blood” epic began, as well. Guy wanders into town, minding his own business, the police unfairly pick on him, and all Hell breaks loose. I wonder if the John Rambo character was the model for Jack Reacher? Of course, Rambo was an ex-Seal with PTSD while Reacher was a spent ex-Army MP just content to be friendly. Both of them, though, had oodles of specific skills to make things right, if they had to. Trouble seems to seek out both of these guys…continuously. It’s always good, though, to see bad police officers and Sheriffs get their asses handed to them by our action heroes. Justice will be done.
John Wayne would be appalled by all of the gratuitous mayhem in the Rambo/Seagal/Reacher movies. They didn’t do things that way in the Old West, particularly in the movies. Yes, Wayne would occasionally break a chair over some guy’s head in a saloon or maybe throw him through a window onto the street. Occasionally, The Duke would get cold-cocked by his sidekick or get tomahawked by a guy with an axe handle. But the real beefs would be settled in a manly fashion… with bullets. Why break a guy’s wrist (a la Seagal) or kick a guys balls up into his groin (Reacher) when you can shoot him where he stands? The good thing about blowing a hole in someone’s noggin is that they can’t miraculously get back up and continue fighting (like they do in Rambo/Seagal/Reacher dramas). It cuts down on the speeches, too.
Finish the guy, I say.
Charlie will probably like the latest “Reacher” incarnation because she is head-over-heels infatuated by another buff good-guy named Rip in the “Yellowstone” series. The series is about cowboying in Montana on a huge ranch that developers want to make into a ski resort and the local Indians want back (from the White Man). Kevin Costner is the Boss of the Yellowstone Ranch and Rip is his Foreman and designated problem solver. Hell hath no fury like Rip on the warpath. He’s Jack Reacher in a permanent state of pissed-off, particularly when it comes to protecting Costner or his daughter, Beth. Awhile back, when some bikers were trespassing on Yellowstone land, Rip drove his Ram 350 Turbo Diesel pick-up truck over about twenty parked Harley choppers and then almost beat the biker chief to death with a branding iron. The bad guy had a gun, by the way, but didn’t shoot Rip: we’ve seen that one before. I guess the biker decided that he’d rather get his brains scrambled by a branding iron than be prosecuted for defending himself with a gun. (I think these script writers must all be high on something.)
Why do I watch this drivel? Why do people read the Bible and go to church? Probably because we all want to see good guys win every now and then.
None of it is reality but, hey, who doesn’t like to see a bully kicked in the testicles?