In the ocean environment, reverberation is a common and strong interference which significantly degrades the performance of target bearing estimation. Meanwhile, sensor failure is inevitable in actual sonar deployment as the underwater scene is complicated. Therefore, it is a challenge for target detection in the ocean reverberation with sensor failure. To address this issue, we propose an improved approach based on the principle of low rank characteristics of matrix in this paper. Firstly, we utilize Hankel structured matrix to counteract the problem of sensor failure. Then, the algorithm of matrix completion (MC) based on l1-norm and l2-norm are exploited to recover the true signal matrix from the corrupted received matrix. Numerical results demonstrate that compared with other related methods, the l1-norm provides better capability in the probability of recovery and shows the best robustness of bearing estimation with the narrow beam width and low sidelobe. Moreover, the proposed approach verifies the performances of reverberation suppression and achieves high resolution of target detection.