Reacher Series 2 - Buffy with headbutts

At the end of my original post on the first series, I wrote,

Also, there is a worrying signal from the promotion of Series 2. Actors have gone online saying the the series will be ‘Bigger and Better than Before!’ and ‘Non‐Stop Action!’ In other words, Series 2 promises to move towards the film versions, loosing the loose charms of Series 1. Plus, the trailer includes an exploding helicopter, which I don’t recall from the book. As a result, I have low expectations of Series 2. And with these bad omens, I won’t believe any of the online commentary or reviews. I expect the charms of Margrave to be lost. I expect worse. I’ll be watching in retrospect, sometime.

Now I’ve had a chance to see Reacher 2 (just after Reacher 4 is released). Let’s start with the good things. There are some.

The producers have settled on a quality of film stock. As is usual nowadays, it’s stretched some from black to white, desaturated as is common in crime drama, and cast towards fawn. I suppose that’s ok and distinctive, and it pulls the technology together with scenes in the countryside and city. The production has settled also on a flow between action and exposition. This was always going to be a challenge with Reacher material because the books depend to some extent on descriptions and internal thought‐process. In any conventional series these will need to be dropped. And there is quality in the camera‐moves. The direction is inventive at finding angles and making pans round the multiple character‐parts in this series. I particularly liked a camera move that ended on a picture of Reacher’s toothbrush resting near a sink… though I doubt this means much to anyone who has not read the books. And, at end, you know I have close to zero interest in character and actors. Well, the actors are good as you would expect from a high‐profit series. But they can’t add much to character parts so drained.

Right. That’s the good stuff, onto the bad. The script flow has resolved into quippy scenes that are non‐filmic. These move plot along. Have the writers have decided that Reacher is a TV sitcom? Lordy, but they prattle—and Reacher is supposed to be a quiet one. The script inserts make me and maybe you wince. Reacher has sometimes been called ‘Dad Detective’ and that means something—part of the appeal is these texts work as sense in lunacy. Whereas the filmic inserts are most often cheap and/or sniggers—‐to call them juvenile is unjust praise—and while not inept, are from the wrong place. When the Reacher gang get to sit down and talk their past this is used as an excuse for Reacher to explain his stance. Same mistake one of the film scripts made in one scene… plainly assembled by people who havn’t got a clue what they are talking about. Not only is this smug, it breaks the Reacher world. It gets worse, these characters finish every decision telling each other how great they are. Not in the books. This script‐talk reminds me of the setup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, without the plot‐with‐a‐point.

Also doesn’t work—the flashbacks. The Reacher books use parallel plots, which gets story moving. But these flashbacks stumble into film‐flashback culture, which is almost always emotionally crude, stale and preachy. Worse, the flashbacks are often scripted not from source material but from script contribution—see comments above. And the streamlined scripting is loosing other aspects of the storytelling. The sense of wonder and reasoning are lost. Somehow this production underplays perhaps the best opening gambit in any Reacher novel.

The music selections are an upfront example of these reworks. To be honest, the idea that Reacher likes the Blues sat awkward with me—it’s true to the cultural gestures in the books that Reacher should have a passing interest in music, but more likely 1950’s Country or some kind of homemade Punk. Anyway, the soundtrack selections here are ‘hard‐hitting’ El‐Ay that could make any generic shooter movie. Twice the production has Reacher in a car where he queries the music selection, to which his gang answer him about why. Intimate scenes are backed with string‐synth washes, which is out of sync with the book texts, and there’s enough of the book in here to make the contrast nonsense. A reference for you—Series 1 backed up intimacy with a scene built round an old Country track, ‘Crazy’ by Patsy Cline, and the appropriateness of that shows how far off the music here is.

Put together the quippy scenes, the self‐congratulation, the sentimental flashbacks, and it seems the producers have become more confident in adding their own material. To dull results. I’d have initially suspected a know‐all confidence from the producers but as the series progressed I began to think different—there’s an insert scene in this series that returns to a popular character from the first series, an idea that was deliberately not part of the books. I think there’s a lack of confidence in the base material or themselves. That would explain the self‐congratulation. And the substitution of the inventive song choice in Series 1 of Howlin’ Wolf, to in Series 2 modern‐production Blues… and the base in this book which unusually introduced extra characters—which characters‐as‐scripted put their trust in group courage rather than a merge of capability. Every repetition of the line, ‘You do not mess with the 101” makes it sound a appeal for admiration by the scriptwriters, not a snappy joke. As does the repetition of the line, “In investigations, details matter”. The upcoming Neagaly spin‐off feels like a desperate run after the opinion of others, not creative conviction.

My girlfriend was dozing while I watched this. She later asked me what I was up to, and I mentioned it was Series 2 of Reacher. She said she thought I had found a B‐Movie on a Free‐To‐View channel, “Some of the dialogue was baaaad!” I say good things linger. No other film or series I’ve seen, besides Breaking Bad, would attempt this improvised plot. By about episode seven, the series gets into some action that could only be Reacher—small‐scale and double‐threaded—and the production does better with the end than the ham‐theatrics of Series 1. Between the residuals of book‐character and actors, there’s some interest. But the text has been compacted then the edges ground off until it becomes a shooter movie played out by characters from a high‐school‐coming‐of‐age script. I’ll be genuinely curious when the musical episode arrives—“Alright everybody, step to the right, raise those Glocks, together, ‘Deeeetails Maatter!!!’”.