Tom Cruise Vs Alan Ritchson: Who Played The Best Jack Reacher?
Jack Reacher originated in the series of novels by Lee Child, in which he's described as 250 pounds, 6-ft 5-inches, and as having "a six-pack like a cobbled city street, a chest like a suit of NFL armor, biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue." But when Hollywood got a hold of him, they hired Tom Cruise to portray that mountain of muscle in 2012's "Jack Reacher" and 2016's "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back." Unfortunately, at 5-ft 7 inches, the "Mission: Impossible" star just didn't work for many fans. An article in the LA Times quotes one incensed Reacher adherent thusly:
"I can not [sic] believe they actually used an arrogant overexposed short IMBECILE to create such an awesome character. I will not see it and it literally RUINED the whole character for me. HOW COULD THEY DO THIS?"
After "Never Go Back," Cruise's diminutive version of the ex-military police officer disappeared. When Jack Reacher returned to our screens in 2022, it was by way of a TV series that starred an all-new actor in the lead role. The Alan Ritchson-starring "Reacher" debuted on Amazon Prime Video in February of that year, and quickly broke Prime Video records, hitting the top of the Nielsen streaming chart and being renewed for a second season just three days after it launched. All of which was very impressive, but the most impressive aspect was the 6-ft 3-inch, 230-pound Ritchson.
The fans evidently loved Ritchson in the lead role, having waited for a more book-accurate version of Jack Reacher for years. Now, finally, it seemed they'd gotten their wish, with a former "Smallville" and "Titans" star giving them the imposing presence they so craved. But was Cruise unfairly overlooked? Or is Ritchson truly the definitive Reacher?
Tom Cruise is Jack Reacher (but mostly just Tom Cruise)
The Jack Reacher of 2012's "Jack Reacher" and 2016's "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" was less Reacher and more just Tom Cruise being a bit less talkative than usual. Which wasn't always a bad thing. Cruise is an action megastar for a reason, after all.
Fans may have been disappointed they weren't getting the absolute unit they knew from the books, but you can't argue with Cruise's action bonafides, which he demonstrated to great effect in his two Jack Reacher films. He also managed to be quite funny in places, bringing a touch of Reacher's atypical sense of humor to the role. When he tells Alexia Fast's Sandy that he "can't afford her" during the bar scene in "Jack Reacher," she responds, "I'm not a hooker," to which Reacher says, "Oh, then I really can't afford you." Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but a decent attempt at bringing some of Reacher's glibness into the movie.
Still, there's no getting away from that fact, as Lee Child put it, "He's too small." Whether you care about that will likely depend on whether you're a fan of the novels. But with Reacher, you do get the sense that his size is somehow integral to the character in a way that it isn't to a Jason Bourne or an Ethan Hunt. Reacher is, as Child went on to say, "a huge hulking scary brute," who if he walks into a room, "the temperature just drops a degree and people are a little worried." That's part of the character's allure, especially since he famously doesn't say much — his physical presence does the talking. But if you're 5-ft 7-inches, how much intimidation through body language can you really pull off?
Alan Ritchson — the Reacher we deserve?
Who'd have thought the male model who wowed Paula Deen with his rendition of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" on "American Idol" back in 2004 would eventually become known for embodying the hulking killer known as Jack Reacher? Originally, Amazon didn't want to cast Alan Ritchson in the role, which at this point seems crazy given how popular "Reacher" season 1 proved to be — in large part because of its more physically intimidating star.
There's no doubt that Tom Cruise just projected a little too much polished movie star prestige to really embody what the New Yorker described as the "existential hero, the apotheosis of the lone stranger, traveling the Lower Forty-eight with nothing but his folding toothbrush and his code." But while Ritchson brings a certain ruggedness to proceedings, even he can seem a little too finely coiffed at times — his perfectly tailored jackets and form-fitting t-shirts failing to convey the kind of itinerant grittiness that Child envisioned in his novels. He's also just a little too pretty to really maintain the illusion of a battle-scarred badass
That said, Ritchson's version of the character is helped greatly by the brutality of the fight scenes in "Reacher," which the actor told /Film were particularly grueling to train for. When Jack Reacher lays waste to a whole gang of thugs in the brutal prison fight, for example, smashing heads through toilets and sustaining some nasty-looking injuries of his own, you get a much more visceral sense of his preternatural combat abilities than you ever did with Cruise's more streamlined and efficient fighting style. Compare the prison fight to the scene in "Jack Reacher" where Cruise's hero takes out five assailants outside a bar without breaking a sweat, and you get the idea.
The winner
This is tough because while many fans of Lee Child's novels feel they've finally been gifted a book-accurate Jack Reacher, there's still something about Alan Ritchson that doesn't quite convey the grittiness of Child's hero. Even buried beneath layers of injury prosthetics and fake blood, he still seems somehow clean-cut. That said, there's no escaping the fact that Reacher's physical presence is an integral part of the character, and Ritchson simply is that.
But there's a little more to it than "Ritchson is bigger than Tom Cruise." The actor clearly values the role in a way that perhaps Cruise couldn't — mainly because a megastar of his stature simply doesn't need Jack Reacher. Cruise can go make a million more "Mission: Impossible" movies and be fine — though he'd better start making them for less than $300 million or hope they do better at the box office than "Dead Reckoning." But Ritchson seems to have spent his whole career building towards playing Jack Reacher, with the actor revealing that Reacher has been his "favorite role to date," and telling Collider that he'd "really fallen in love" with the character after reading the books.
That commitment and reverence for the role has clearly helped Ritchson get close to portraying the definitive version of Child's hero, and it's a major point in his favor. With that in mind, this one's gotta go to Ritchson. But I think it's worth highlighting that Cruise was perhaps unfairly maligned — especially when the tenor of the fan response can be summed up by the LA Times reader who dubbed him a "short IMBECILE." None of this is important enough to get that worked up over, so while Ritchson just edges this one, maybe revisit Cruise's two movies before you stream "Reacher" season 2 this December.