Here’s Why the Tom Cruise ‘Jack Reacher’ Movies Are Better Than the TV Show Everyone Loves

There aren’t many instances where Tom Cruise’s version of a character gets overshadowed by someone else’s. Frankly, there aren’t that many instances of Tom Cruise playing a role also inhabited by another actor; even on a more symbolic level, his Ethan Hunt, created for the Mission: Impossible film series, is now far more synonymous than anyone to do with the classic TV show that inspired it. Does Cruise (eventually) playing a mummy in The Mummy count? Probably not; no one really thinks of that as Cruise playing a mummy, or Cruise replacing Brendan Fraser. They think of it as Cruise in a Mummy movie that didn’t work. Such is the power of one of the most globally recognizable movie stars of the past half-century.

Alan Ritchson, like most of the rest of the world, is not on Tom Cruise’s level. He’d be easy to spot in a crowd, to be sure; he’s tall and muscle-y to be believable as Jack Reacher, the signature part he’s played on the Amazon streaming hit Reacher for two seasons now. But surely some people who did recognize Ritchson would shout for him as that character – hey, man, it’s Reacher! – rather than his actual name. It’s harder to imagine anyone calling out “Maverick!” or “Ethan!” for Tom Cruise (except, of course, Ving Rhames).

And they certainly wouldn’t call out “Reacher” for him, either, because it’s easy enough to forget that Cruise did, in fact, play Jack Reacher first, in an abbreviated two-film franchise that predates the Amazon show. It’s a savvy move for Netflix to license these titles, and makes sense that they jumped into the Netflix Top 10; we’re between Reacher seasons, and while Cruise’s version of the character was moderately successful in theaters, there are probably plenty of newly minted Reacher fans who haven’t seen the movies (especially the ill-regarded second installment, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back). The popular consensus among those who have seen both, especially those who are also familiar with the Lee Childs books that form their source material, is that Ritchson is the better, or at least more accurate version, of the man described as 6’5 and 250 pounds. Cruise, by contrast, is a below-average 5’7 and has to choose his camera angles carefully in order to appear of normal height.

It’s true that Ritchson more clearly embodies the Lee Child’s vision of Jack Reacher, an unstoppable force for chivalry and self-sufficiency who will politely tear off his own zipties in a way that makes you realize he could have done so all along. It’s also true that Reacher is enjoyable, easy-to-binge, airport-novel-on-TV stuff, like a comfort-watch CBS procedural with a memorable character already built in. Still, a part of me mourns for the curtailing of Cruise’s Jack Reacher franchise, because in a lot of ways, it’s better than the show – especially the first movie.

Though Reacher is a former military man, Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher plays up the noirish angle of a drifter rolling into town on the bus with only the clothes on his back and the cash in his pocket; by comparison, the unmissable Ritchson version looks more like a guy who got separated from his tour group. Cruise, admittedly, reads as more of a weirdo as we learn more about his spare, no-frills, no-change-of-pants lifestyle – another in his post-2000 line of warrior monks. Yet this weirdness also sells the character’s mystique with more grace, just as having a skinny, semi-short guy issue beatings to groups of thugs is more pleasing and faux-surprising than having a mountain of a man turn out to be, indeed, a mountain of a man. (The funnier twist with an appropriately gigantic Reacher would have him be not that great at fighting, just using brute force – but the Childs faithful would never allow such heresy.) By comparison, Ritchson plays Reacher as more of a smug superman, waiting for the lesser beings in his wake to screw up.

Beyond my personal preference for Cruise, a man of considerably skill and movie-star charisma, over the more workmanlike Ritchson, Jack Reacher itself has a great nighttime vibe, with a seedier, creepier feel than the show wants to evoke. This is aided immeasurably by the delightfully inexplicable presence of Werner Herzog as the bad guy of the piece, lending some standard conspiracies – Reacher is investigating a soldier accused of a mass shooting, has every reason to think the man guilty, but becomes convinced this isn’t the case – an unknowable menace not often seen in mainstream movie adaptations of airport novels. McQuarrie turned out to be an accomplished director of Cruise Action in the Mission: Impossible movies that followed (he helped write the fourth, then has directed every entry since), and it’s fun to see him practice on a smaller, grubbier scale here.

That Mission: Impossible connection means that Jack Reacher turned out to be a crucial movie in Cruise’s 2010s, which focused so heavily on reclaiming his brand, sometimes at the expense of his formidable talent. He struck the strongest balance between the two in the McQuarrie-scripted Edge of Tomorrow, a year and a half after Reacher, but this movie put him on the right path in between middling simulations of the Cruise Thing that came with Knight and Day and Oblivion. He may have been grasping at straws, but this was a particularly good straw.

By the time Never Go Back rolled around, Cruise had another Mission under his belt, and a four-years-later Reacher sequel felt like an afterthought. Yet that movie is also pivotal to Cruise’s trajectory, in that its middling box office results, preceding the underperformance of The Mummy, seems to have helped to convince Cruise to put all his chips into finally making Top Gun 2 and (maybe) finishing out the Mission: Impossible series. On the basis of the movie itself, this was not a bad decision. The Mission: Impossible movies are world-class, Cruise-branded spectacle; he’s made them into his second-act life’s work. Top Gun: Maverick, of course, beat long odds to become a beloved all-time smash. In all the hullabaloo, nobody much missed Jack Reacher beating up guys in parking lots. But even Never Go Back – an all together squarer, less atmospheric Reacher adventure – is highly watchable, maybe the closest thing Cruise could ever make to a streaming movie. Look, Denzel Washington makes stuff like this all the time.

Maybe that’s why Cruise’s Reacher resonates more than Ritchson’s. This is probably the role of a lifetime for Ritchson, and by all accounts he seems like a cool guy, not nearly as meatheaded as you might stereotype him. At the same time, watching his Reacher is like watching an uneven, vaguely juvenile comic book adaptation that all of the hardcore fans swear up and down is more “accurate.” Tom Cruise and Jack Reacher aren’t a perfect match: This isn’t one of his signature characters, and he’s not the obvious choice to play a burly, courtly super-detective. Even when the character involve self-flattery, Cruise has to work at it. Reacher is a frictionless experience; that’s why watching Ritchson easily avoid various scrapes makes such an easy comfort watch. Jack Reacher, however, has just as much Sunday-afternoon comfort, while scraping harder.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.