There’s a scene at a bowling alley in the fourth season of Prime Video’s Reacher that you will rewind. Not because you missed it. Because you need confirmation that a streaming service signed off on it.
It did. And there are two more like it, one in a library and one down a stairwell.
That’s the shorthand for where this show is four years in. You know what you’re getting at this point, and the only real question each season is whether the delivery still lands. Season 4 isn’t the franchise‘s high point. It still does more than enough to keep the streak intact, handing fans everything they’ve come to expect and doing it better than any other name in the action thriller game.
The show had every reason to fumble this one
Reacher arrived in 2022 as an adaptation of Lee Child’s mammoth novel series, and expectations were dampened by two unspectacular movie releases in the 2010s. The one thing working in its favor was that Tom Cruise’s replacement actually looked like the figure fans had been carrying around in their heads for years. A glint of optimism, nothing more.
Then season 1 hit like the big man’s ham-sized right hook. Visceral action, well-defined characterization, plots that held. This was finally Jack Reacher. The show cleared streaming milestone after streaming milestone, and the next two runs cemented Alan Ritchson‘s place atop the mountain of action heroes on Prime Video and its rivals.
Season 2 widened the palette with the Special Investigators. Season 3 went undercover for a revenge story that got personal.
So season 4 walked in carrying weight. Season 5 is confirmed, a Neagley spinoff lands later in 2026, and the questions were stacking up. Had the series overreachered itself? Could Ritchson keep the unblemished streak going in a crowded genre? Was Gone Tomorrow the right book to adapt? Would Amazon’s budget finally stretch to some T-shirts in Jack Reacher’s size?
The fights are the best they’ve ever been
Reacher would be a fairly drab ordeal without its fight sequences. Prime Video’s series has always understood the value of a well-choreographed punch to the face, and action is the one area where season 4 undeniably improves on everything that came before.
This year’s eight-round bout is packed with outrageous, near-comical violence that just about stays on the right side of ridiculousness. Three seasons of heavy-handed antics haven’t prepared anyone for the bowling alley.
Beyond the fist fights, there’s artful driving work, aerial stunts that tighten your jaw, and a much greater focus on blades. If season 3 with Paulie was a blunt hammer, and it was a very effective one, season 4 is a scalpel. The set pieces have been built with care, and they don’t look like anybody else’s.
Losing Neagley should have hurt more than it does
Ritchson is the beating heart of this thing, but Reacher lives and dies by its ensemble. The show has been strangely good at finding worthy playmates: Roscoe and Finlay in Margrave, then Neagley and the Special Investigators, then the solid Duffy/Villy double act. Season 4 had to pull that off again, and for the first time it had to do it without Neagley at all.
It works anyway. Sydelle Noel is the highlight as Detective Tamara Green, stealing most of the scenes she’s in and probably deserving more of them. Her dynamic with Reacher is nothing like what previous co-stars built, and it’s a credit to Noel that Neagley, great as she is, isn’t missed.
Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette brings a dose of relatable humanity as Jacob Merrick. Kevin Weisman’s Plum is more than comic relief. Kevin Corrigan’s Docherty gets the season’s best one-liners and knows exactly what to do with them.
The identity of Reacher’s enemy is a major plot point and we’re not giving it away. What can be said is that the new antagonist, or antagonists, mark a needed break from the usual gaggle of gangsters who wander into his path.
The first half keeps too many secrets
One thing holds season 4 back from sitting alongside the first and third, and it’s this: the back half is noticeably stronger than the front.
Blame the twists. Season 4 plays its cards closer to its chest than any run before it, and that backfires, because without context it’s harder to care. The opening episodes are a blur of shady agencies, unidentified mercenaries, unseen villains and unclear motivations. You end up with a pile of anonymous characters and factions and no clue what any of them want, why, or even whether they’re the good ones.
It’s hard to invest when neither the characters nor the audience know what’s happening or what the hero is supposed to do about it. That stretch runs surprisingly long.
The earlier seasons didn’t do this. Season 1 established almost immediately that justice for Reacher’s brother and the soul of Margrave were on the table. Season 2 opened with Special Investigators being thrown out of an aircraft. Season 3 had Reacher’s target identified before episode one started. Only when this year’s story finally begins teasing its bigger picture does the whole thing click into place.
Uneven pacing has a second cost. When the information does arrive, it arrives all at once, which means long, hard-to-digest slabs of exposition. One of them lands immediately before a sex scene, as though awkward plot recap is some kind of aphrodisiac.
Tall Jack gets it wrong, and that’s the good part
Not topping past seasons is hardly a damning critique here. The series knows precisely what its viewers want and supplies it in bulk.
Season 4 earns bonus points for humbling its main character more than he’s used to. Reacher makes a fair number of missteps across this case, real ones, and watching what those errors do to him pulls out a shade of Ritchson’s performance nobody has seen in four years of this show.
That alone is worth the price of admission. The bowling alley is just the tip.
