Amazon’s Reacher offers an entirely different experience than the one offered by the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher movies. Featuring Tom Cruise as its title character, Jack Reacher and its sequel explored books from Lee Child’s award-winning series of mystery thriller novels. Now, Amazon Studios is doing its own take on Reacher’s story, except this time in the form of a TV series.
Rather than bring back Cruise, Amazon’s small-screen adaptation stars Titans actor Alan Ritchson. The show’s eight-episode first season tells the story of the first book in Child’s series, Killing Floor. Like Cruise’s movies, Reacher sees its protagonist causing trouble in a small town and taking down several criminals standing in his way en route to solving a complex murder case. To date, Reacher has proven a worthy, faithful retelling of Child’s first Jack Reacher story - garnering immense popularity as a result.
On the surface, Amazon’s Reacher series seems to have much in common with Tom Cruise’s movies, as both have a heavy dose of the same type of humor. The formula for both stories looks similar, as do the personalities of the two versions of Reacher. However, Reacher is a far cry from a repeat of the Jack Reacher movies, with arguably the biggest difference being how its story unfolds. As movies, Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back had to compress entire books into two-hour stories, whereas Amazon’s show is better positioned to adapt each book’s slow-burn approach.
In the original Jack Reacher books, the titular protagonist was known for having a very methodical and analytical style. As Ritchson says, Reacher “picks apart these cases.” There were, of course, elements of this in Cruise’s movies, but neither could put as much depth into it like the books, which Reacher accomplishes in a way that’s truer to the source material. Fittingly, it takes Ritchson’s Reacher eight episodes to slowly unravel Killing Floor’s central mystery, leading to a far more nuanced retelling of Child's classic espionage story.
Another change getting a tremendous amount of attention is how Ritchson's character compares to Tom Cruise’s Reacher. Obviously, there’s a difficult-to-ignore size difference. At 6’2”, Ritchson’s take on the character is considerably larger than the five-foot-seven Tom Cruise. The physical appearance of the character featured in Reacher hardly matches Cruise’s portrayal in the films, but it closely resembles how he was described in Child’s novels. His height and physicality were among his most notable characteristics, so casting a character who has that look fits with the show’s efforts to deliver a book-accurate Jack Reacher story - marking it as a more worthy Jack Reacher adaptation in the eyes of fans.