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........

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