The Craziest Things Reacher Uses As a Weapon, Ranked

Amazon Prime’s Reacher is an anti-authoritarian’s authoritarian fantasy. Jack Reacher is a big guy who fights exclusively on behalf of the little guy; through sheer brute force, he evens the score and makes everyone do the right thing, or else. Each season, Reacher takes on bigger systems, punching them until they are a wet stain on the pavement. Big agriculture, private security firms, international drug cartels — all are choked out by Reacher’s big ol’ biceps. Season four sees him going after terrorists and the CIA in equal measure, pummeling each beyond recognition in increasingly baroque ways. Have you ever seen those movable library shelves, the ones you turn a crank to open and close, and thought, Gee, I hope nobody gets squished to death by those? Well, on Reacher, someone very much does. That’s how this season starts, and Reacher’s methods of maiming and/or killing only get more elaborate. We ranked the season’s best.

13. 
Ice blocks and tongs

Reacher takes on a team of CIA operatives at a Baltimore pier. The vignette in which he and an agent smash huge blocks of ice into each other’s heads lacks oomph. It feels less like life-and-death struggle and more like pro wrestling — until a pair of industrial ice tongs comes into play. Reacher uses it to grab a guy by the neck and fling him into a huge wall of ice à la those Scandinavian ice hotels. Dude goes down for the count. 

12. 
Deep fryer

Any time a fight scene is staged in a commercial kitchen, you just know the deep fryer will get involved. But it’s just one element of a bowling alley utilized in a fight between Reacher and hired killers in episode three. Reacher submerges a guy’s hand in the oil, temporarily disarming him. But then so much else happens in the fight that the fryer gets lost in the sauce. If the henchman didn’t appear a few episodes later, hand still extra crispy, you’d forget it even happened.

11. 
Industrial shredder

Those people who make the “Industrial Shredder vs.” YouTube videos should never do shredder vs. human hand. Not for the ethical implications but because the shredder wins, excuse the pun, so handily it’s almost boring. Almost. On Reacher, it’s still fun to see a guy’s hand disappear in a cloud of blood. There’s also some dramatic tension in the time between when the shredder is introduced and when Reacher uses it. Chekhov’s shredder. And yes, this is the same guy whose hand got fryolated three episodes ago. Same hand, too.

10. 
Propane tank

Again, Reacher is not reinventing the wheel. People use propane tanks to kill in film and television all the time. Heck, people use them to kill in real life. It’s the way he uses the propane as part of a henchman-killing mousetrap that makes the scene fun. First, he carries the tank to a higher floor by hanging from the bottom of an elevator as it rises, looking like Donkey Kong about to throw a barrel. Then he places the tank in the middle of the hallway and throws some trash so the henchman thinks he overheard Reacher moving through the building. Once the mook is within blasting range, Reacher explodes the tank with a bullet — making both the man and the floor as holey as Swiss cheese. 

9. 
Crab trap and fishing net

Reacher loves adding local color where it can, so when in Baltimore, there’s going to be crabbing. “What else would be at a commercial fishery?” the stunt coordinators of Reacher seem to ask themselves. The CIA and Reach avail themselves of every item: Fridge doors, buoys, you name it. Reach uses a crab trap to disarm a G-man brandishing an On the Waterfront–style hook. Then he wraps the net around the man’s neck and pulls him in for a headbutt. Kind of like when a lady grabs a fella’s collar and pulls him in for a kiss, but violent. You’ll never look at the décor at Red Lobster the same way again.

8. 
Bowling pin

The second I saw Reacher go into a bowling alley, I thought to myself, Oh boy oh boy, I sure do hope Reacher hits a bad guy with a bowling pin There Will Be Blood–style. And unlike Paul Dano in that movie, my prayers were answered. Reacher beats mercenaries about the head with a bowling pin and a bowling trophy. He also throws a bowling ball at a dude’s face, making a perfect 7–10 split between his eyes. All under the black-light haze of cosmic bowling while KC and the Sunshine Band plays — diegetically because it’s cosmic bowling.

7. 
Door

A door sounds boring compared with the various bowling implements we just discussed, does it not? Well, what if I told you Reacher apparently ripped a giant metal door off its hinges, then used it like a shield, then slammed it into a dude’s neck so hard his spinal cord broke like the One Wish Willow, and the actor sold it with the goofiest “I am d-e-a-d dead” face I’ve ever seen? What then? Door went from perhaps not even making the list to a solid, middle-of-the-pack standing based on that actor’s corpse work alone.

6. 
Chopsticks

In episode three, mercenaries rock up to the Reacher gang’s secret hideout intending to kill them all. Our heroes are woefully unprepared. One has a gun, one has a can of wasp spray, and one has a fire extinguisher. And Reacher? Reacher grabs some chopsticks. Before you can say pork lo mein, they’re in a dude’s eye. Reacher then uses the one-eyed merc as a human shield, then kills another guy with the railing of the stairwell he’s standing in. At the end of the fight, even Reacher’s allies look at him like, Man, you are messed up.

5. 
A whole-ass SEPTA train

Again, Reacher loves local color. In a fight with yet more mercenaries, Reacher smacks a gun out of a guy’s hand using one of Philadelphia’s moving subway trains. The gun and the hand are never seen again. The mercenary also makes use of Philly’s public-transit system by electrocuting himself on the third rail rather than disclosing whom he works for.

4. 
Mobile shelving

In the season premiere, Reacher gets into a fight in the basement of Philadelphia’s gorgeous Parkway Central Library. While his associate scans microfiche, Reacher gives the first of many, many, many unnamed mercenary characters the ol’ Giles Corey special. Squish.

3. 
Nails someone else nail-gunned into his own hand

The Bible would have been very different if Jesus had reacted the same way when his hands got nailed to the cross. When the mercs take a page out of Reach’s book and start improvising with stuff they find in their environment, one guy takes a nail gun and nails Reacher’s hand to the floor. Does this stop our favorite ex-MP? It does not. He pulls the nail, still attached to his hand, out of the floor, then open-hand slaps a guy. The nails scramble the bad guy’s brain like a panful of eggs. 

2. 
Bars of his own jail cell

Throughout the season, Reacher keeps maiming the same CIA operative in fight after fight. In episode five, they have their penultimate showdown in a Philly jail. Agent Foster, posing as a city cop, has brought a tranquilizer gun to knock out Reacher and stage his suicide. This does not happen. Instead, Reacher pulls Foster’s head through the bars of his cell, shearing off the man’s ear before tranking the guy with his own gun. We get a visceral sense of how painful getting one’s ear ripped off would be: There’s screaming, there’s goo, there’s excellent SFX added in post. But since Foster is portrayed as unmitigated evil, we take glee in the cartilage loss rather than side-eyeing our hero. This is the Reacher formula: evil bad guy + the cruelest injury you can imagine = catharsis.

1. 
Old-timey elevator

Foster’s de-earing is the season’s most emotionally fulfilling moment of violence. But when Reacher uses an elevator to decapitate a low-level henchman in the season finale, the show reaches(!) a level of sadistic glee usually reserved for slasher movies. Reacher holds a man’s head in an elevator shaft so he can see the elevator descend and rip the guy’s head from his body. It’s very similar to the first kill in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil film series, thus making Reacher kind of like if the Umbrella Corporation’s super-zombies were on the side of good and dug the blues. Reacher likes the blues.