The Prime series remains its big, fun, very violent self.

Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson), the “has toothbrush, will travel” man, has returned to television and not a moment too soon. Reacher Season 2 is exactly the kind of low-commitment viewing one craves as the year ends and the holidays overtake everyone’s lives. While a large, jolly man busies himself filling many of our stockings, who better to enjoy than a large, angry man knocking bad guys out of their socks? Especially when, like this time, it’s personal!

Reacher and Neagly (Maria Sten, back from Season 1 and fully second on the callsheet this time, thankfully) first met when they were members of the 110, an investigative military police unit. As seen in flashback, the group is the last time Reacher had anything approaching a stable group of friends. In the present day, several team members have gone missing, suggesting that perhaps someone is targeting them. Reacher connects with Neagly and the two join up with the only other two 110 members they can find. O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos) is the unit clown and womanizer turned family man and inside the beltway fixer. Dixon (Serinda Swan) is a forensic accountant/warrior who shares an obvious but unconsummated crush with Reacher.

Together, they face off against wave after wave of largely faceless thugs, only differentiated by their castes. There are security guards, bikers, workaday thugs, and ex-military mercs by the truckload. Captaining this criminal enterprise is Langston (Robert Patrick), in total growling, overconfident master planner mode. Rounding things out is a mysterious assassin who uses only aliases that make the initials AM (Ferdinand Kingsley) and Guy Russo (Domenick Lombardozzi), a New York cop understandably less than thrilled about Reacher’s tactics. If all this makes the show sound a bit, shall we say, clichéd, well you aren’t wrong.

The antagonists are Reacher Season 2’s weakest part. Yes, Patrick does seem to be having a good time playing the kind of boss who will take credit for your successes and blame you, then shoot you, for your failures. But it is not an especially complex role, and nothing in the script pushes the character into wild or compelling. Kingsley’s assassin is plenty intriguing, but that ends up being all there is to him. He is, to likely misuse a euphemism, all hat and no cattle.

Thankfully, Ritchson seems to grasp that his character’s very existence is too unbelievable not to make him something of a figure of fun. Even beyond his scripted wisecracks, he seems to understand that letting Reacher get laughed at helps the series. He’s a surprisingly gracious screen partner, easily sharing space with his co-stars despite how his frame fills the screen. He’s good at giving face—a grimace, a smirk, a stare—that helps push the jibes at him across the finish line to funny. He also has good comedic chemistry with his 110ers in flashback and the present. There’s zero heat between him and Swan, which is disappointing in the wake of what I thought was a decent coupling between Ritchson and Willa Fitzgerald, but no one is coming to Reacher Season 2 for touching romance or hot sex, let’s be honest.

The real MVPs of the series, however, are Sten and Lombardozzi. Sten deepens Neagly from the interesting but dramatically thin badass we met in season 1, largely without an assist from the plot or scripts. She just has a great presence, and her connection with Ritchson feels earned and honest. Lombardozzi is better than anyone would have any right to expect. We’ve seen cops on TV like him a thousand times, at least, but he finds a little something more to give in each scene. The guy calls the NYPD the greatest police force in the world and sells it so damn hard it’ll take the viewer of 15 count before saying, “Would we say greatest?” And that’s not even the biggest of his accomplishments.

The only hesitation with Reacher Season 2 comes from the remarkably cavalier dispatching of that glorious violence. This reviewer has no desire to be a scold or prude, but much of it simply didn’t sit well. In Season 1, the deaths doled out by Reacher seemed necessary. There were tons of them, yes. Still, it didn’t generally feel like he was dispatching someone who was no longer a threat. In this season, he and his team kill people unlikely to be a threat to anyone for months to come. Yes, Reacher is a blood-soaked fantasy with as little to do with reality as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. And yet, the sight of the heroes going above and beyond with their murdering still churns the stomach a bit.

Ultimately, as you can see, it doesn’t push Reacher Season 2 into a not recommended. The morbid humor, a few surprisingly deeper-than-needed performances, and the action sequences that don’t make this reviewer feel somehow complicit make it a far more enjoyable than not viewing experience. It’s an irresistible strain of big, wonderfully dumb action Dad TV. I still wish it felt a little less gleeful about wracking up the bodies of already beaten tangential baddies.

Reacher Season 2 flexes its biceps, triceps, and all the other muscles on Prime Video starting December 15.

Reacher Season 2 Trailer: