Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Our Man Jack

Malcolm Gladwell writing in The New Yorker about the Jack Reacher novels. An excerpt:

Lee Child has now written twenty Jack Reacher novels. In each, Reacher kills roughly a dozen people—which means, if you do the math, that he’s murdered somewhere north of two hundred people in the course of his lifetime in fiction. That’s a lot of killing, and in “Make Me” the bodies seem to pile up faster than usual. For example, there is an intense set piece in a gated community outside Phoenix. Reacher has to confront three heavily armed bad guys aiming to do some serious damage while simultaneously protecting the hysterical family that has stumbled, for complicated reasons, into the middle of the madness. Reacher doesn’t have a gun, naturally. He has to get one from the bad guys, protect the family and kill lots of people, all in a really short period of time.

2 comments:

Dan in Philly said...

About 10 years ago I stopped watching violent movies and TV shows. As a consequence I find when I do have to watch a show with violence it greatly disturbs me. I lost my numbness to it.

I watched the new Star Wars movie with my son and was shocked almost the entire movie at the sheer body count, you personally see hundreds of people die and witness millions die through massive bombings. Later I asked others if they found the violence as bothering as I did, and almost no one found it shocking or unusual. The Jack Reacher novels and movies are all along the same line, I guess. Just shockingly and gratuitously violent by any standards other than our own modern ones.

Michael Wade said...

Daniel,

I'm of two minds on it. I rarely watch films that seem to have violence for the sake of violence but I don't have a problem if the underlying message is that evil must be defeated.

Michael