Suburban Homeowner Starts, Loses Fight With Enormous Jack Reacher Star Alan Ritchson

For my money, the funniest recurring bit in Amazon’s highly variable action-comedy series Reacher is the use it makes of its main character’s blank, brutal sociopathy. Reacher, in Reacher, is generally righteous, but the code that he follows serves mostly to offer him one shortcut after another to outlandishly brutal violence. He is swift and certain in his assessment of every situation, which means that he is often doing stuff like brusquely folding some henchman’s body like a fine-dining waiter might fold a discarded napkin, to the evident horror even of those otherwise on his side. Reacher will squint and mutter something like “It was one of Col. Grissom’s kill team,” or “He was with the Ecuadorians,” if questioned about it, and some short time later, he will say “I want pancakes now” in roughly the same tone.

But that is just my opinion. If you polled most Reacher watchers, they would probably tell you that the funniest Reacher trope is how many characters try their luck against him in single combat. Reacher is canonically enormous, a Gronkowski-sized violence engine hard-wired to dispense compound fractures to those who exploit the vulnerable who is, paradoxically or not, absolutely catnip to members of the Exploit The Vulnerable community despite being effectively invulnerable himself. In Reacher, the role is played by the slightly less large but still objectively mountainous actor Alan Ritchson, and while the show throws in some visual gags grounded in Ritchson’s size—two full-sized characters briefly obscured by his refrigerator-sized torso, one regulation-sized barbecue grill hurled through the window of a sedan—most of the size-related storytelling comes down to some version of this:

Having a main character who is never wrong and also cannot be defeated in any physical fight imposes some obvious dramatic limitations on the broader enterprise, but it sure does put this particular gag on a tee. Some Reacher seasons are better than others, but none of them have really failed to deliver when it comes to sending delusional henchmen at Reacher, one at a time or in a doomed and sneering wave. Ritchson is a pretty compelling performer, and by all appearances a decent fellow as well, but his job in situations like these is mostly to look large and displeased, and then do all the compound fracture stuff mentioned earlier. Ritchson is good enough at that part of the gig to make this particular bit land, with a sickening crunch, every time. It is not plausible, but if I may refer you back to the “He threw a barbecue grill into a Buick” thing, plausible is not the goal here. Quite the contrary, in fact—part of the fun of it is that no one would actually start a fight with Alan Ritchson.

One thing that we now know about Ronnie Taylor, a resident of the upscale Nashville suburb of Brentwood, is that he would absolutely do that. The only reason Taylor’s name is appearing here is that he did, or more precisely that he did and then hopped on a video call with TMZ to tell his side of the story about how Alan Ritchson came to absolutely beat his ass, in the upscale Nashville suburb of Brentwood, in a fight that Taylor initiated. In Taylor’s version, he flipped off Ritchson and his sons on Saturday while they were riding through the posh neighborhood’s extremely wide and quiet streets, and got a middle finger back for his trouble; when they came through on Sunday—in his interview with TMZ, Taylor describes the noise of Ritchson and his sons on their bikes as “this incestuous revving”—Taylor was ready. His plan: Storm into the street while yelling and waving his arms, causing Ritchson to stop and stumble off his motorcycle, and then to yell at Ritchson some more, and then to push him off his bike twice, and then finally to get absolutely whomped by the armoire-sized star of Amazon’s Reacher. And then, I guess, to tell TMZ about all that.

It would be irresponsible to speculate about what type of guy Ronnie Taylor is. He has an accent and claims to be a fellow motorcycle enthusiast. In his interview with TMZ, there is a framed poster for the 1964 film Zulu, about the 1879 defeat of British colonial forces in the battle of Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa, visible on the wall behind him. (“If you’re not too squeamish at the sight of slaughter and blood and can keep your mind fixed on the notion that there was something heroic and strong about British colonial expansion in the 19th century, you may find a great deal of excitement in this robustly Kiplingesque film,” the New York Times review read.) Less clearly visible, on a hat rack behind Taylor, is a red baseball hat with white lettering on it in a familiar style.

Much more visible and less ambiguous are the marks that Ritchson left on Taylor’s face when, in Taylor’s words, “He kicked the crap out of me.” Enough neighbors witnessed it that TMZ’s coverage now opens with an update noting that Ritchson did not initiate the altercation. “I don’t wish the guy any malice or ill will,” Taylor told TMZ, “we just don’t need people riding through neighborhoods like this, and I just decided to take a stand because someone else has to.” There is an extent to which it is almost possible to see Taylor’s side of things—the sort of engines in the bikes that Ritchson and his kids are riding really are loud and annoying—although his behavior is so unhinged and aggro that the point is hard to credit.

Ritchson, for his part, seems to wish Taylor at least a little bit of malice and ill will, as indicated by the fact that he has been doing the sort of oblique but spicy social media posting mostly associated with disgruntled wide receivers. TMZ also obtained footage from the GoPro that Ritchson was wearing.

The audio is inexplicably much lower in the mix than a Chill Beat To Study To, but the action is not difficult to follow. There’s Taylor, pointing and screaming and wearing a T-shirt for the local private school Battle Ground Academy. There are the eerily shadeless streets and lush lawns of the subdivision, and Taylor screaming the phrase “fucking lunatic” repeatedly; between the music and the muffled mania of Taylor’s voice, there is almost a sort of Godspeed You! Black Emperor aspect to this part of it.

There are Ritchson’s two kids watching it all happen, still and wordless. There is, briefly, Ritchson’s enormous shadow cast on the sidewalk and over a cowering Taylor, and the muffled sound of a familiar voice saying, “Are you fucking out of your goddamn mind?” It is unmistakably the voice of the actor who plays Reacher, and not that of Reacher himself; Ritchson sounds much more distressed in that moment than his character ever does. Otherwise, though, you’d have to say that the scene unfolds along some very familiar beats.