When Prime Video’s Reacher series debuted, the reaction from fans of the Lee Child crime novels was relief. Relief the show was good, naturally, but mostly relief about the casting of their hero, Jack Reacher, the implacable former military detective of no fixed abode. Alan Ritchson might be more chiselled and less grizzled than the older, slobbier character in the books, but he was appropriately huge (Reacher is supposed to be 6 feet 5 inches tall) and unstoppable, moving through both fights and nefarious plots like a freight train. This was more like it!
Specifically, it was more like it than Tom Cruise, the first actor to play the character in the movies Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (now streaming free on Tubi). Fans had been aghast at the casting of the diminutive 5’7″ Cruise, and never got over it. The movies did pretty well on mid-sized budgets, but Child eventually came to agree with his readers and opted to find a taller dude and reboot the adaptation for TV.
The glow of approval that surrounds Amazon’s Reacher has retrospectively tainted these movies with the reputation that they’re duds. But the fact is that the show might never have been made without the Cruise-produced films bringing the character to a wider audience, and most of what Reacher gets right is either copied from what the movies nailed the first time, or adjusted in the context of where they went wrong.
Also, they’re not bad! Well, Jack Reacher isn’t bad; Never Go Back is, admittedly, exceptionally boring. Jack Reacher is solid, one of the last examples of a kind of mid-range studio filmmaking recipe that, a mere 14 years later, is all but lost to us. Namely, take a street-level, low-key crime plot, put a massive star and some overqualified character actors in it, and spend a bit but not too much, juicing up the production with atmospheric location shooting and some fancy car chases and action scenes. Job done.
Jack Reacher adapts the ninth Reacher novel, One Shot. An ex-US Army sniper, James Barr, calls for Reacher — or summons him, somehow, by writing his name on a piece of paper — when a clear trail of evidence leads to Barr’s arrest for a mass shooting in Pittsburgh. Reacher, a drifter who lives entirely off the grid, ends up working with Barr’s defense attorney Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike). At first he thinks Barr is guilty, but as he picks away at the case, he starts to suspect Barr has been framed as part of a criminal conspiracy headed by a spectacularly frightening Werner Herzog. Later on, Robert Duvall turns up as an ornery old coot who owns a gun range.
Part of the pleasure of Jack Reacher is watching the evolution of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s style as he settles into his mind-meld with Cruise, whom he met on 2008’s Valkyrie. McQuarrie used to specialize in clever, talky crime movies like The Usual Suspects and The Way of the Gun; after Jack Reacher, Cruise handed him the keys to Mission: Impossible and he drove both his writing and directing styles to ever more absurd heights in the pursuit of spectacle and the burnishment of Cruise’s screen persona.
You’d think Jack Reacher would have more in common with McQuarrie’s earlier films, but it’s the early flashes of his Mission: Impossible flamboyance that really stand out, in particular a fantastically sustained car chase, and Herzog’s chilling monologue about that time he chewed all his fingers off as a prisoner of war. The movie’s sturdy and well-made, and it looks cool and moody, but these more outlandish, comic-book passages are when it comes alive.
This should work for Cruise, who brings his trademark intensity and physicality to Reacher, and whose stardom has enough of a mythical dimension to support multiple characters (including Reacher himself) pausing the narrative to talk about how superhuman he is: a vengeful ghost, with flawless powers of deduction and terrifying combat skills. It’s absurd, but the whole Cruise project is, right?
Only something is off, and it’s not just the height. Reacher needs to be cool, in terms of his temperament as much as anything else, but Cruise’s secret is that he’s never been cool. He’s a striver and a maniac, his determination always on the verge of desperation. As the similarly superhuman Ethan Hunt, in Mission: Impossible, that works, because he’s always racing to catch up with the fantastical, end-of-the-world stakes. As Reacher, getting down and dirty in grubby alleys, flirting with girls, and methodically cleaning out humanity’s trash, you don’t buy it. There’s something cynical about the way he’s trying to build a new franchise around himself in Jack Reacher, which is the main reason that franchise didn’t pan out.
Jack Reacher is ten times better than The Mummy (2017), though, and a totally credible and enjoyable crime movie. The show wouldn’t exist without it — and, for now, we can only dream of seeing Ritchson in a Hollywood production this well-funded and handsome, facing off against a Werner Herzog or a Robert Duvall. Maybe one day.