When Alan Ritchson first appeared as Jack Reacher — the ex-military hero at the heart of Lee Child’s eponymous books — in Prime Video’s aptly titled Reacher, we couldn’t quite believe our luck. After being somewhat, er, short-changed by Tom Cruise’s casting in Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher duology, good as those films were, Child’s 6’5″ lone wolf had finally found an actor with the brawn as well as the brains to do Reacher justice. Alan Ritchson is, frankly, effin’ huge! And yet, as the newly dropped first teaser for Reacher Season 3 somewhat unbelievably attests, Ritchson is about to meet his seven foot tall match in the upcoming third series of Amazon’s crime series. Check it out below:
HO. LY. SHIT! “I’ve been waiting for this moment for some time now,” says Ritchson’s man mountain at the start of this new teaser. On the one hand, as we watch a quick-cut montage of our man Jack doing his Reacher thing, it feels like he’s talking about us and our eager anticipation for his return to our screens. On the other, it’s pretty clear he’s talking about his face-to-face with the even manlier, even mountainier Paulie, played by seven-foot-two bodybuilder Olivier Richters. A heavy of Reacher newcomer Anthony Michael Hall’s rug merchant Zachary Beck, Paulie makes Ritchson look like his own Reacher action figure — and slaps him to the ground with preternatural ease. “He’s twice my size,” Reacher conservatively tells fan-favourite Neagley, to which she replies, “Last time I saw a guy twice your size was on Mount Rushmore.” And honestly, fair.
Now, the teaser shows us very little else from S3 (it is, after all, only 40 seconds long), aside from Reacher bouncing some wrong’un’s bonce off a kitchen table before sipping a coffee — but we do at least know the book that the season ahead is adapting. Reacher Season 3 will bring Persuader, Child’s seventh Jack Reacher book, to our screens. Per Amazon’s logline, this time around “Reacher must go undercover to rescue an informant held by a haunting foe from his past.” It’s a cryptic tease, for sure, but one elucidated by the book’s blurb: “When Reacher witnesses a brutal kidnap attempt, he takes the law into his own hands. But a cop dies. Has Reacher lost his sense of right and wrong?”
Well, has Reacher lost his sense of right and wrong? Will he even have any senses left after a scrap with Paulie? (*Spoiler*: Season 4 is already confirmed — Jack’s going to be just fine!) We’ll find out exactly how everything goes down when Reacher returns Prime Video on 20 February, 2025.