Somewhere in the fourth season of Prime Video’s Reacher, a bowling alley sequence arrives that you’ll almost certainly scrub back to. Not because it went by too quickly. Because you’ll want proof that a streaming platform actually greenlit it.
It did. Two more of the same order follow, one set in a library and another in a stairwell.
Which tells you most of what you need to know about this show four years on. The formula is no mystery by now, and the only question worth asking each year is whether it still connects. Season 4 doesn’t rank as the franchise’s peak. It clears the bar comfortably enough to keep the run unbroken, giving the audience the full menu it turns up for and serving it better than anyone else working in the action thriller lane.
The show had every reason to fumble this one
When Reacher debuted in 2022, adapted from Lee Child’s enormous run of novels, hopes were low after a pair of underwhelming films in the 2010s. Its single advantage was that the man taking over from Tom Cruise genuinely resembled the character readers had been picturing for years. That was a flicker of hope and little else.
Then season 1 connected the way the big man’s ham-sized right hook does. Brutal action, characters drawn with real definition, stories that actually held together. Jack Reacher had finally shown up. Streaming record after streaming record fell, and the two seasons that followed installed Alan Ritchson at the summit of the action-hero heap on Prime Video and everywhere competing with it.
Season 2 broadened things out with the Special Investigators. Season 3 sent him undercover for a revenge plot that cut close to home.
Season 4 therefore arrived carrying a load. A fifth season is confirmed, a Neagley spinoff is due later in 2026, and the questions were piling up. Had the series overreachered itself? Could Ritchson protect the spotless record in a genre this packed? Was Gone Tomorrow the correct novel to bring across? Might Amazon’s budget finally cover a few T-shirts that actually fit Jack Reacher?
The fights are the best they’ve ever been
Strip out the fight scenes and Reacher becomes a fairly grey slog. This series has always grasped what a properly choreographed shot to the jaw is worth, and action is the single department where season 4 clearly betters everything that preceded it.
The eight-round bout on offer this year is stuffed with over-the-top, almost comedic violence that only just avoids tipping into absurdity. Three seasons of heavy-handed antics leave nobody ready for the bowling alley.
Away from the fists, there’s some elegant driving work, aerial stunts that clench your jaw, and far heavier use of blades. Where season 3 and Paulie amounted to a blunt hammer, and a highly effective one at that, season 4 works like a scalpel. These set pieces have been assembled with real care, and they resemble nobody else’s.
Losing Neagley should have hurt more than it does
Ritchson is what keeps this thing alive, yet Reacher rises and falls on its supporting cast. The series has an odd knack for casting worthy sparring partners: Roscoe and Finlay back in Margrave, then Neagley and the Special Investigators, then the dependable Duffy/Villy pairing. Season 4 needed to manage the trick once more, and for the first time it had to do so with no Neagley on hand.
Somehow it lands. Sydelle Noel stands out as Detective Tamara Green, walking off with most of her scenes and arguably earning a few more. What she and Reacher build looks nothing like the chemistry earlier co-stars managed, and Noel deserves the credit for the fact that Neagley, terrific though she is, never feels absent.
Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette supplies a shot of recognisable humanity as Jacob Merrick. Kevin Weisman’s Plum amounts to far more than comic relief. Kevin Corrigan’s Docherty draws the season’s sharpest one-liners and knows precisely how to land them.
Who exactly Reacher is up against counts as a significant plot point, so we’re keeping quiet on it. What can be said is that the fresh antagonist, or antagonists, represent a welcome departure from the usual assortment of gangsters who stumble into his path.
The first half keeps too many secrets
A single flaw stops season 4 standing beside the first and third, and it’s a simple one: the closing stretch is markedly better than the opening one.
Put it down to the twists. This run guards its hand more tightly than any before it, and the tactic misfires, because caring is difficult without context. The early episodes amount to a haze of murky agencies, unnamed mercenaries, unseen villains and murky motives. What you’re left with is a heap of faceless characters and factions, with no sense of what they’re after, why, or which side any of them are on.
Investment is a tall order when neither the cast nor the viewers can tell what’s going on or what the hero is meant to do about it. That stretch drags on longer than you’d expect.
Previous seasons avoided the trap. Season 1 made clear almost straight away that justice for Reacher’s brother and the fate of Margrave were what’s at stake. Season 2 kicked off with Special Investigators being hurled from an aircraft. Season 3 had named Reacher’s target before the first episode even began. It’s only once this year’s story starts hinting at the wider picture that everything snaps together.
The lopsided pacing carries a second penalty. Once the information does show up, it all shows up together, producing lengthy, indigestible blocks of exposition. One of them arrives directly ahead of a sex scene, as if a clumsy plot recap functions as some sort of aphrodisiac.
Tall Jack gets it wrong, and that’s the good part
Failing to beat earlier seasons hardly counts as a damning verdict in this case. The series understands exactly what its audience is after and delivers it by the crate.
Season 4 picks up extra credit for humbling its lead more than he’s accustomed to. Reacher gets a good few things wrong over the course of this case, genuine errors, and watching the toll they take draws out a register of Ritchson’s performance that four years of this show haven’t shown before.
That by itself justifies the ticket. The bowling alley is merely the opening act.