Amusing and entertaining – though not very taxing: Amazon Prime's Reacher reviewed

Jack Reacher is back on the screen and aficionados of the hugely successful Lee Child airport thrillers in which he appears must be hugely relieved. This time he is played not by pint-sized Tom Cruise but by someone much closer to his 6ft 5ins height: a musclebound giant called Alan Ritchson.

Not having read any of Child’s 100 million-selling oeuvre (probably because I’m bitterly envious: he’s a Midlands-born ex-media type, like me, but has a slightly larger bank balance), I can’t tell you how true to the original Ritchson is. But he plays him as if he’s on the autistic spectrum — a loner uncomfortable with too much dialogue or human emotion of any kind, who just wants to get the job done. That job is killing all the baddies.

How on earth does Reacher get a body like that with no obvious effort or exercise regimen?

In the first of what will presumably be many Amazon Reacher seasons he finds himself in small town Georgia, almost instantly being hauled up by the corrupt local police (Southern cops don’t seem to have evolved much since Live and Let Die) as the suspected murderer of the unidentified man found dead by the roadside.

The corpse — spoiler alert but not really: you find this out in the first episode — turns out to be Reacher’s beloved long-lost brother. Naturally enough, Reacher’s thoughts turn to dire vengeance. But meanwhile — a monosyllabic giant would be a bit boring on his own — he needs to gather a team of contrasting sidekicks, including Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin), a black, Harvard-educated detective in a tweed suit, and Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald), a hot blonde policewoman with a delicious Southern accent who is not afraid to use her gun.