I will say upfront that Alan Ritchson is the quintessential Reacher. If the Prime series came out before the movies, no one would take Tom Cruise seriously for wanting to portray the 6’5 behemoth. However, if you view the “Jack Reacher” movie as a standalone, Cruise does an excellent job. The movie doesn’t rely on other characters cowering in fear because of Reacher’s appearance, so he can use creativity and manipulation to get out of distressing situations. While in the book “One Shot,” Reacher relies more on brute strength. 

The movie also consolidates several characters. For instance, Rosamund Pike plays Helen Rodin, the defense attorney. In the book, there were three other characters that were not included in the movie. They include Rosemary Barr, the sister of the accused James Barr, Eileen Hutton, who was a prosecutor in the Army while James Barr was in trial, and Ann Yanni, the TV reporter who assists Reacher to unravel the Russian’s plans. 

All three characters have a hand in moving the plot forward, but in the movie, Helen absorbs these responsibilities instead. I thought this was a great call because there were way too many characters in the book, and it would have been confusing if the movie tried to include all of them in the story. 

I did myself a disservice by watching the movie first. Because of the nature of condensing the book as much as possible, reading it felt like navigating an enormous amount of detail that I felt was irrelevant.

Take the scene where Reacher first meets Sandy. In the movie, the scene itself doesn’t waste time observing the sports bar. In the book, Lee Child goes into great detail to set the scene. However, if you’ve been to one sports bar, you’ve been to them all. 

“It was like every other sports bar he had ever been in. It was one tall room with black-painted air conditioning ducts pinned to the ceiling. It had three dozen TV screens hanging from the walls and the roof. It had all the usual sports bar stuff all over the place. Signed uniform jerseys framed under glass, football helmets displayed on shelves, hockey sticks,basketballs, baseballs, old game-day programmes.”

Child even acknowledges this with his description. While I understand the intention to set the stage, the wording here is an example of the entire book, where Child doesn’t trust the reader enough to get a lay of the land without spoon feeding the scene. 

The other change I liked was the setting. Pittsburgh was a much better place to show action rather than Indiana because of the use of the bridged highway, river, and Capitol-like steps where the shootings occurred. When reading the book and seeing Indiana, to be honest, I just didn’t take it as seriously. The Pittsburgh setting created a political-type thriller that made the killings more sinister.