As an entrepreneur in the rug trade who has hired hunk hobo and muscular murder man Jack Reacher, I am not very happy with his work performance. His heart doesn’t seem to be in it.
The cons: he’s surly. He’s shifty eyed. He says things in a suspicious and knowing manner. He’s constantly taking mysterious coffee and toilet breaks after which he turns up sweaty and covered in blood. Since he’s been around, several of my other employees have gone missing. Though, it has to be said, I am surprisingly incurious about this and am just eager to get on with the job.
The pros: he saved my son from a kidnapping attempt, though it is unclear if I actually like my stupid son. He also successfully passed my hiring process, which is, against most HR wisdom, a game of Russian roulette in a shed. (This is, on reflection, impractical on several levels, and I am considering competency-based interviews in an office instead.)
Look, it’s a difficult one. All I want to do is produce, distribute and sell high-quality rugs with a crew of surprisingly violent employees. I can’t be spending my time wondering about the career commitment of alluring murder hunks. It is possible, I realise, that my rug business is a front for something else, but that hasn’t been clearly established by the end of episode three.
We already have Great House Revival. What we need now is Feck the Preservation Order, Let’s Knock It and Build an Office Block
On Prime, Jack Reacher is still wandering from town to town, much like the 2FM Roadcaster
‘It’s boobing out!’ Kim Kardashian cries. Irish Times readers will recognise this reference to the Heaney poem of that name
Holly Willoughby is well used to troublesome co-hosts. Bear Grylls may like insects and urine, but he’s not Phillip Schofield
And that’s my retrospective audition for the part of Criminal Rug Salesman and antagonist in series three of Reacher. I think I nailed it.
Yes, it’s another season of Reacher, and former military policeman Jack Reacher is still wandering from town to town, much like the 2FM Roadcaster, though in truth he provides a very different kind of roadshow.
Alan Ritchson, who plays Reacher, has an acting style that involves glowering while focusing a lot on the punctuation in the script, obeying it absolutely. You can hear the commas when Ritchson speaks. So he isn’t exactly charismatic, but he is massive and, consequently, has a certain pull (probably literal gravity). The only viable adversary for a man of his size would be the moon, but instead most of the people he murders are normal-sized humans.
He is essentially a special effect. The literary creation of a Corkonian waterbaby (Lee Child), Reacher was once made of words, but now he is made of rich prime beef. He looks like those strange AI pictures on Facebook featuring children who have made animals out of Coke bottles, except in this instance it’s a man sculpted from beef. (“My nephew made this man out of beef and nobody appreciates it. Please tell him you like it in the comments.”)
Nonetheless, in each season he turns up to a new town masquerading as a regular guy, a man of the people, a simple burgher (a beef burgher, if you will). But curses! Reacher can’t roam freely without getting involved in fisticuffs and gunplay, for such is the United States today. “Trouble always finds me!” he cries, much like a reality-TV contestant might say, “I hate drama.”
And within moments of arriving in a small-town shop called Vinyl – Reacher’s personality, like those of 25 per cent of middle-aged men, is that he likes the blues – he is out on the street, firing a gun to rescue a youngster from a kidnap attempt.
The youngster is the son of the rug salesman I channelled above. In his rescue attempt Reacher accidentally shoots a policeman in the chest. I know what you’re thinking: Reacher should be allowed to shoot policemen in the chest if he wants to. But unfortunately, thanks to woke, this is illegal now.
So Reacher goes on the run and ends up working for Big Rug. He gets sucked into a netherworld of rug addicts and rug dealers, including a huge henchman, huger even than Reacher himself (played by the moon, I think).
There is, of course, more to all this than meets the eye. Reacher is (spoiler alert!) part of a ruse to infiltrate the rug business, and when he is finally left alone in the rug merchant’s luxury mansion he takes a tiny secret phone from the heel of his shoe in order to call his handler. Thanks to Reacher’s huge size it’s also possible that this is a normal-sized phone.
Reacher can be quite convincing when he’s glassing a jerk or sticking a crowbar through a hoodlum’s sternum or folding a human corpse so he can hide it under a desk. (This genuinely happens in episode two.) He also has a great swagger, resembling nothing more than a muscly snow angel as he perambulates forth, his huge arms and legs splaying because he quite literally can’t put them together without affecting the tides.
From time to time some local yokels reckon it’s a good idea to pick on this glowering 7ft muscle mountain. “What a nerd!” they think when they see him. This happens in every season, and the interaction always ends with broken limbs and screaming.
This is great fun. It’s also, of course, an adorable masculine power fantasy, there to soothe the American nation’s struggling menfolk. “That’s what I’d do if I ended up in a fight,” says an audience of men in crisis, “if I wasn’t so sleepy and sad.”
Reacher is less convincing when engaged in other pursuits. When he’s “running”, for example, he looks like a muscly version of classic 1970s cartoon Bod, his legs going up and down inside his geometrically impossible body. When he’s sneaking up on people he plans to murder he does so as convincingly as a rhino might sneak up on people a rhino is planning to murder. And his way of hiding the fact that he is on a secret mission is simply to not blurt out “I am on a secret mission” while looking for all the world like he’s on a secret mission. Frankly, it’s a wonder this illicit rug business has survived this long.
It’s also hard to picture Reacher having a realistic romantic relationship with another human being (less so with a tractor or a wall). Nonetheless, there is a moment in every season – and this season is no different – when a female colleague gazes at Reacher strutting about in his pants (clothing chafes his delicate skin) and gets a hungry, desirous look in her eye. Whether this is a hunger for hunk lovin’ or a nice beef barbecue is left unclear. I imagine it’s both.
It’s also unclear to me if Reacher has genitals or is smooth down there, like an Action Man or a second-term Trump appointee. Best not think of Reacher’s genitals, really. I think it was Sartre who said that. Or possibly the HR representative just before we played Russian roulette.
