For years, author Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character was a fixture of the multiplex, with movies providing reluctant-leading-man-of-action opportunities for Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. Most of them were hits. (Sorry, Chris!) In that context, it might seem a little low-rent that the newest character’s newest adventure, Jack Ryan: Ghost War, is actually a made-for-streaming continuation of an Amazon TV series, where John Krasinski takes over the CIA analyst role. But there are potential advantages to this approach, too: four seasons of the show can establish the character and his world, relieving the movie version of the full reboot burden. (No small thing for a familiar character who’s nonetheless been played by five different guys.) In particular, the existence of the hit show eliminates the standard waffling over what stage of Ryan’s career he should start in. Let the TV show handle the salad-days stuff, and the movie can join him mid-career without requiring several box office successes to get there.
And to its credit, Jack Ryan: Ghost War manages to stand alone quite well despite the preceding 30 episodes of set-up. (I certainly don’t remember them all with crystal clarity, and I was never lost on a plot level.) Less fortuitously, it’s more coherent than competent, especially compared with the previous movie versions. That might not seem like a fair fight, but Ghost War does position itself as some kind of movie after four seasons of serialized television; there must be some reason for this new framework, whether it’s a bigger budget, a more pulse-pounding story or a chance to put Krasinski alongside his predecessors. (He’s already played Ryan for more hours than any of them.) By the end of its 105 minutes, though, the movie seems to eliminate the most obvious possibilities, and its reason for being hangs in the air.
Ghost War rejoins Ryan, who has quit the CIA and landed a job with a hedge fund, hoping for a shot at the normal life his cloak-and-dagger past has denied him. (His normal life apparently must involve unfathomable wealth.) Then his old boss James Greer (Wendell Pierce), deputy director of the CIA, resurfaces to ask Ryan for a minor favor during an upcoming business trip to Dubai. But a quick (if elusively described) meet and drop-off becomes more complicated when the other guy is murdered mere feet away from Ryan. Soon the ex-agent and his former colleague/current contractor Mike November (Michael Kelly) are tenuously joining forces with MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller), tracking a plot to reactivate terrorist groups.
A plot to reactivate terrorist groups could also describe Jack Ryan: Ghost War. Obviously terrorism still exists, but there’s something about this movie’s geopolitical outlook that feels firmly rooted in the late 2000s, when 9/11 was still a relatively recent world event and countless government norms remained in place, no matter how morally murky foreign policy might get. Ryan’s questioning of the American dream, which is more or less how he puts it in a howler of an argument he has with Greer, focuses almost entirely on shady international affairs, in the vaguest and most fictionalized terms possible. The harder the movie ignores political realities of the 2020s, the more it feels like a period piece drifting through the ether.
Krasinski has a greater degree of accountability for the bad speeches than past Ryans; he’s the first actor to play Jack Ryan from a script he co-wrote. It’s dire stuff, especially considering the decent work he did on those Quiet Place movies; here, there are no less than three lines predicated on the phrases “that’s a thing” or “that’s not a thing”, dialogue that wouldn’t pass muster in a sitcom or a Marvel movie, let alone something aiming for more substantial gravity. If it seems like four seasons of TV would be more than enough time to work out feeble jokes about espionage earpiece etiquette, think again. Ryan has been variously played as gruff, nerdy, charming, self-righteous and slick. Krasinski is the first actor to make him look like a smug lightweight. (Yes, Pine’s underseen version was vastly more likable.)
Surely Ghost War must at least work as a bigger-canvas action movie, then? Not really. There’s a moderately entertaining car chase and some high-volume shootouts, and director Andrew Bernstein certainly keeps it all moving along at a pace. But the film’s thrills are sadly limited and small-screen-y, with only flashes of globe-hopping intrigue. The big climax takes place in an anonymous-looking skyscraper under construction, which beats the green-screened anti-locations of a few early scenes, but not by much. Diehard fans of the show might find more enjoyment in seeing Krasinski, Pierce, Kelly and Betty Gabriel back again, or adding the believably hard-bitten Miller to the mix. The movie does set up potential for a continuing movie franchise. Mostly, though, Jack Ryan: Ghost War feels like a sad state of affairs for the world’s dads (and dads at heart), who deserve to see airport-novel espionage brought to less chintzy life.
