Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: Alan Ritchson, Amazon Prime, amazon studios, lee child, Reacher, The Killing Floor

Reacher Turns Fighting Into Art Form in Amazon Season 1 Comp Video

So now Amazon Prime is getting into the supercuts game with Reacher, apparently now the top streaming show in the world. This compilation video collects the fights from the eight-episode first season… and it's only surprisingly 5 minutes long.

If you're reading this, you probably don't need to know that Reacher is an adaptation of the first Jack Reacher novel "The Killing Floor" by Lee Child. There are currently more than 20 books in the series and at least 100 million copies sold worldwide. Possibly 200 million. We don't know for sure. We haven't done a headcount personally. The show is proving to be major comfort food for people. Who would have thought a big, hulking hero, played by Alan Ritchson, who wanders from one town to other righting wrongs by punching and killing all the bad guys would be so popular? Other than maybe anyone with a brain? Jack Reacher is as uncomplicated a hero as you can get. He's big, he's strong, he's smart and he punches bullies.

So instead of a compilation of his wisecracks, of which he makes many, they made one of his fights. Considering that Reacher punches people at least once in each of the 8 episodes of the first season, it's surprising this video is so short. Maybe the scenes where he just punches someone once don't count? Anyway, the fights that are taken directly from the book faithfully visualize them, name the two fights Reacher gets into in prison. As in the books, it's not just sheer brawn and physical strength that makes Reacher's fights the highlight of the story. It's the way he strategises and uses his strength and speed. The books consistently describe the way Reacher uses his elbows as weapons as much as his fists. He swings them like axes while his large fists serve as wrecking balls. He also uses his weight for momentum and uses it to shift the center of gravity when he's up against larger enemies. He follows famed samurai Miyamoto Musashi's basic tactic for winning fights against multiple opponents, which is that he doesn't fight several people at once but separates them through distance and movement so he's fighting one opponent at a time. Reacher's fight logic is solid. If there's any false note, it's the men who aren't as big or tall as him taking him on. By rights, those fights should be over in seconds but this is TV, where things have to be drawn out for the sake of dramatic suspense. But that's the compromise of network-style TV for you. But hey, those 5 minutes are an advertising tool to entice more people to watch the show, so we don't hold that against it.

Reacher is now punching people on Amazon Prime.

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