A Tom Cruise action thriller that yielded above average reviews from critics, pulled in $218 million at the box office on a $60 million budget, and ended up getting a sequel doesn’t sound like the sort of movie people would struggle to get on board with, but there was a lot of folks out there who could never get over the diminutive star headlining Jack Reacher.
He may be cinema’s most infamous daredevil that’s staked his reputation risking life and limb in the name of our entertainment, but he’s also about a foot shorter than Lee Child’s literary favorite, something a huge percentage of fans couldn’t see past. The author was initially supportive, but he too changed his tune eventually, although we can all agree Alan Ritchson fits the bill and then some in Prime Video’s popular reboot series Reacher.
Sequel Never Go Back may have underwhelmed to the point of killing Cruise’s franchise entirely, but the opening installment remains a refreshingly old school bone-cruncher that leans into its hard-boiled trappings to great effect, with Werner Herzog hamming it up as the villain of the piece a welcome addition to any project.
10 years later, and Jack Reacher still packs enough of a punch to put pedal to the metal on streaming, having cracked the most-watched charts on both Prime Video and Paramount Plus this week, per FlixPatrol. Nowhere near Cruise’s best run-and-gun adventure, but far from the worst either, the A-list megastar’s mid-tier offerings are still a great deal more entertaining than plenty of the dreck getting pumped out by Hollywood on an annual basis.