Reacher Season 3 Review: TV's Best Action Show Gets Its Mojo Back

The appeal of Jack Reacher lies in its simplicity. Here is a man who is stronger than you, smarter than you, better looking than you. Here is a man without any of the anxieties that make your life difficult, a man literally tied down to nothing, a man carved out of pure American mythology who has been claimed by every corner of the political spectrum. And most importantly, here is a man who uses his seemingly superhuman abilities to right the wrongs of strangers as he travels the country in obscurity, stumbling into situation after situation where a little bit of righteous justice can protect an ailing community. Jack Reacher isn't just a power fantasy — he is the power fantasy, an American riff on the unstoppable heroes of ancient myth, a figure whose one and only concern is doing the right thing, even when doing the right thing involves a dozen broken arms and snapped neck or two.

Author Lee Child understood the powerful, base appeal of Jack Reacher when he created him nearly 30 years ago. And when Prime Video's "Reacher" debuted, it was clear the character was in the hands of a team of writers and filmmakers who understood that appeal. However, the show's second season was a regression, a startling step backwards in quality that was as puzzling as it was disappointing.

So the third season of "Reacher" arrives with something to prove. It needs to be as good as the first season. It needs to shrug off the sins of the second season. It needs to prove that, like its title character, this series can absorb punishment and get right back up. Thankfully, the new season isn't just a bounce back: It's a high watermark for the series so far — a violent, hilarious, oddly charming spectacle of muscle and grit and sardonic comedy. It's sexy, too. "Reacher" isn't just back — it's back with a vengeance.

Based on "Persuader," the seventh (and best) novel in the series, season 3 finds Reacher (Alan Ritchson) trapped in a posh Maine mansion owned by a dangerous businessman (Anthony Michael Hall) with murky motivations and a small army of armed guards. But all it not as it seems (of course), and it quickly becomes clear that Reacher isn't trapped in the mansion as much as those poor fools with such breakable arms and snappable necks are trapped with him. How Reacher gets into this situation, and how he navigates it, is the stuff of spoilers (the first episode maintains the book's stellar, hair-raising initial twist), but it's like watching the shark from "Jaws" let loose in a swimming pool crowded with Bad Dudes Who Have It Coming. Let's just say that someone in the past wronged Reacher, he's now in the vicinity, and people who wrong Reacher don't get to live long.

"Reacher" has known from frame one that star Ritchson is the kind of screen presence you build an entire show around, and season 3 doubles down. Bulging with impossible muscles and constantly showcasing equally impossible smarts, Reacher is cocky and slightly obnoxious and deadpan hilarious, an immovable object in human form who sees no need to change because no one has ever been more correct about anything than he is at a given moment. Reacher is a titanic character, and one who requires a titanic actor to give him his due. And whether he's obliterating obnoxious townies with his bare hands, squaring off against a villain who somehow makes him look tiny (Olivier Richters, understanding the assignment), or offering tough love to an aimless kid desperate for love while also disparaging hipster ice cream flavors, Ritchson fills the screen like some kind of modern American Hercules. It's safe to say that it's impossible to imagine anyone else in the role.

If part of Jack Reacher's appeal is that he cannot and will never change, it's up to the supporting cast to morph around him as he fundamentally changes the shape of their world by simply existing. While there are plenty of remorseless villains waiting to have their skulls crushed by Reacher throughout the season, Anthony Michael Hall offers surprising pathos as the least bad of the bunch, a doofus who's in over his head and doesn't know how to love his son. It's the kind of role that could've been phoned-in, but Hall brings real shades of humanity to Reacher's opposition, giving our leading man a real reason to move a bit more cautiously on his quest to break every single neck that stands in his way. Johnny Berchtold, as the above-mentioned son, provides a wonderful foil to Reacher, especially as Reacher himself starts to take an interest in this backbone-free dork.

However, the real secret weapon of the season is Sonya Cassidy as Duffy, a DEA agent whose own personal vendetta intertwines with Reacher's. Utterly unimpressed by the musclebound vagrant she's forced to bring into her mission, her no-nonsense attitude and room-filling Boston accent provide the perfect counterbalance to Ritchson's laconic energy. He's the ticking time bomb, but she's a machine gun. She dislikes him until she doesn't, and it's the kind of wiry dynamic that keeps a character as stoic as Reacher fresh. Future allies in future seasons can and should use Cassidy's performance as a guiding light.

As an action show, "Reacher" taps back into the more contained, visceral, personal violence that made season 1 feel so brutally alive. The nondescript gunfights of season 2 are largely gone, and the show wisely builds its action around the simple pleasure of watching someone as beefy as Alan Ritchson rip and tear his way through an entire cast of baddies. Like the original novels, the show's basic action appeal boils down to "What if we staged the most ridiculous violence imaginable but treated it like we were shooting something realistic and tactical?" The result is like watching Michael Mann try to film Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Commando," and I mean that purely as a compliment.

There's a giddiness to the new season of "Reacher" that's addictive. Because this is a hero who exists so powerfully outside the rule of law, and whose motivations are so straightforward and whose mission is one of such pure righteousness, we're allowed, encouraged even, to whoop and holler during each ridiculous crescendo of action. And even when he's not on a killing spree, Ritchson's Reacher remains a remarkable visual effect: watch him scale the side of a mansion in the season premiere in one unbroken shot and remind yourself why we're drawn to action heroes to begin with. This is a show that made its brick-wall-shaped leading man scale a house for our pleasure.

I've heard "Reacher" described as a "dad show," much like how I've heard Lee Child's novels dismissed as "airport reads." But that ignores the amount of craft and skill necessary to create pure entertainment, and how much talent is required to allow us to get totally and entirely lost in something built to deliver a pure good time. When it comes to television that exists to activate the pleasure sensors of the brain, you simply cannot find a better option than "Reacher." Sure, it stumbled last time around, but oh, man. If only all comebacks were this sweet.

/Film Rating: 8.5 out of 10

"Reacher" season 3 begins streaming on Prime Video on February 20, 2025.