Tom Cruise who? Hulking action star Alan Ritchson has now played beloved antihero and skull-knocking machine Jack Reacher in more adaptations of Lee Child’s bestselling book series than the Reacher before him (who’s currently busy risking life and limb as a different beloved action hero), and judging by the reviews for “Reacher” season 3, it’s a role Ritchson was meant to play.
The three-episode premiere of the Prime Video series’ latest season dropped on the Amazon-owned streaming service this week, and the response from fans and critics alike so far has been impressively positive. The season currently boasts a 97% Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, meaning that 28 of the 29 RT-approved critics who previewed the season liked or loved it (it maintained a coveted 100% for quite a while). It’s enough to bump the new season into the Certified Fresh category, which puts it in the company of other great 2025 releases like the third seasons of “Yellowjackets,” “Invincible,” and “The White Lotus,” the audacious second season of “Severance,” and the first season of Max’s incredible medical drama “The Pitt.”
Unlike most of the aforementioned shows, though, “Reacher” offers a specific brand of pulpy, testosterone-fueled thrills and a hero who always punches people for the good of the nation. On the surface, it’s exactly the kind of quasi-patriotic, action-packed programming that has stealthily become Prime Video’s bread and butter (see also: “Jack Ryan,” “The Terminal List”), making it a hit that has more in common with “Yellowstone” than “Yellowjackets.” But “Reacher” has a secret sauce in the form of its coyly subversive scripts and a surprisingly well-rounded and endearing mythic hero — not to mention the actor who plays him.
Prime Video’s Reacher series in on a roll
In /Film’s own review of season 3, Jacob Hall wrote that “the show wisely builds its action around the simple pleasure of watching someone as beefy as Alan Ritchson rip and tear his way through an entire cast of baddies.” Ritchson, Hall writes, “remains a remarkable visual effect,” the embodiment of the “American riff on the unstoppable heroes of ancient myth” that Child imagined decades ago when the novel series first started. It also helps that the season 3 plot is a banger; the story is pulled from “Persuader,” Child’s seventh “Jack Reacher” book and an enduring fan favorite. It involves a kidnapping, a bait-and-switch that comes to fruition in the show’s season premiere, a guy who’s even bulkier than Reacher himself, and — in the Prime Video version — a villain played by Anthony Michael Hall.
Currently, “Reacher” season 3 has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than the show’s first season, and a much higher score than both Cruise-led films from the 2010s (2016’s “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” has well over 100 negative reviews from critics — ouch!). The show is still going the weekly release route, with new episodes expected to stream each Thursday on Prime Video until the end of March. By that point, we assume Reacher will have stacked up a mountain-sized pile of bad guy bodies, outsmarted the highest-IQ people in the world, and respectfully hooked up with a capable hot lady or two. That’s the “Reacher” way, after all.