After having covered the initial teaser trailer for Reacher season 3, which is set to release on February 20th on Prime Video, Amazon has finally dropped a full-length and it sure looks to be another action-packed season with the Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) that we all know and love, leaving even the journalists most critical of season 2 hopeful for what’s to come.
One such critic, Forbes pop culture journalist Erik Kain, has leveled some legitimate criticism at Reacher season 2, even if I don’t think it was as bad as he makes it out to be. Nonetheless, I agree that the character of Jack Reacher, who is normally something of a one-man army, was dragged down by his lame ex-army buddies (barring Maria Sten’s Francis Neagley, of course), while the show itself suffered from poorly shot and sloppily choreographed fight sequences, most notably when the group tussle with a biker gang in a parking lot. The increasingly predictable plot and ever-widening plot holes didn’t help either.
Judging by this latest full-length trailer, though, it seems that Reacher will be returning to the more consistent glories of season 1, as the titular hero lone wolfs his way into a drug smuggling operation, but he is still aided by some new faces, including his latest female ally and love interest, DEA agent Susan Duffy (Sonya Cassidy).
The trailer opens with Reacher…well, being Reacher by knocking out a goon who is passing inappropriate comments at a maid as they sit in a kitchen, coffee in hand and all. Reacher characteristically defending a woman’s honour aside, he is almost certainly in the kitchen of one of the season’s main villains, Zachary Beck (played by legendary Brat Pack actor Anthony Michael Hall), who was not shown in the original teaser. Beck runs an oriental carpet business, but the DEA believe it is a front for drug smuggling and thus enlist the help of Reacher to infiltrate them, who they seem to have found at some second-rate motel, which is certainly in line with Reacher’s wandering ways as a self-proclaimed hobo.
Beck is believed to be in business with a dangerous ex-army Lieutenant Colonel named Quinn (Brian Tee), whom Reacher had once investigated for selling military secrets. These particular details about Quinn are not mentioned in the trailer, though we do see Reacher, in a flashback, discovering a woman’s body when Quinn is brought up, while he also mentions that he thought he had killed him all those years ago.
The villain upon which the promotional material has been most focused, though, is bodybuilder Olivier Richter’s Paulie, who will present the most physically imposing challenge for Reacher yet. Amazon have really been hyping up the macho tensions and inevitable head-to-head between the two characters, and this trailer is no different as it shows them duking it out on three separate occasions. The first shows them in a weight room, competitively lifting weights until they resort to arm wrestling, which ends with Reacher suddenly letting go of Paulie’s hand, consequently punching himself in the face. This moment is clearly signalling that while Reacher is at a rare physical disadvantage, he still possesses the smarts to outdo even the most imposing of foes. For the other two instances where they fight, one was already shown in the teaser, where Reacher punches Paulie in the stomach, to no avail, before he is all too easily smacked to the floor, while the other shows the two, battered and bloodied, facing off on Beck’s mansion grounds in what could be the season finale.
Thankfully, we won’t have to wait much longer for this highly anticipated face-off, as we are spoiled with the first three episodes being released simultaneously on February 20th, while the remaining five episodes will air weekly until the March 27th finale.