on Google Preferred Source Google News Link copied to clipboard By Oli Welsh Published Aug 16, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT Opinion And it's free on Tubi
After 25 years, we're officially getting a Kingdom Hearts anime The best Star Trek quote isn't 'Live long and prosper' After bombing in theaters, Amazon's epic fantasy reboot is a Prime Video sensation 3 weeks running Prime Video's Reacher owes everything to this underrated Tom Cruise thriller Image: Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection Sign in to your Polygon.com account 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.
Photo: Shane Mahood/Amazon Studios 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.
Photo: Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures via Everett Collection 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, t…