Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst/action hero Jack Ryan has a cinematic history that goes back to 1991’s The Hunt For Red October, but in that time, Ryan has been played in movies by almost as many different actors as have played his now-Amazon stablemate, James Bond. And like Ian Fleming’s 007, the cinematic Jack Ryan has long outlived his creator, Clancy, who died in 2013.
Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine all played Ryan in movies, with Ford the only one to portray him more than once. John Krasinski portrayed Ryan on an Amazon Prime Video series since 2018, which makes him the longest-serving Jack Ryan, although I gather Krasinski’s busy movie career has caused the seasons to sometimes air years apart.
And now, for the first time, Krasinski is playing Ryan in a movie, albeit one that, aside from a premiere and some preview screenings, is going straight to streaming. The film is Jack Ryan: Ghost War, and Krasinski co-wrote it with Aaron Rabin, with Noah Oppenheim sharing a “story by” credit with the star, in a story that isn’t based on any particular Clancy book. The movie offers some decent action, but it’s in the service of a relatively rote spy story. (The director is Andrew Bernstein, a veteran mostly of TV shows like Mad Men, The West Wing, ER, and The Americans.)
It’s one of two movies this week: Star Wars’ The Mandalorian and Grogu, the other, that represents a feature-length sequel to the TV version of a long-running franchise.
As the movie begins, Jack Ryan has retired from spying and is working in a civilian job on Wall Street. He’s lured back by his old boss, Greer (Wendell Pierce, playing the part James Earl Jones did in the 1990s movies), for a mission involving a rogue MI6 agent (Max Beesley). In this they’re assisted by MI6 officer Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller, having some fun).
The story hopscotches from the United States to London to Dubai, which is talked about so glowingly that it’s like paid product placement, and back, with an impressive action sequence or two, but not much else. It’s a familiar plot, whether in the Bond series or elsewhere. There’s nothing as intriguing or original here as in The Hunt For Red October, in which Ryan alone realized that Sean Connery’s Soviet submarine captain was trying to defect, or the drug cartel machinations of Clear and Present Danger. I was convinced by Krasinski in the Ryan role. I just didn’t care that much about most of what he was doing.