Movie review

This movie begins, as so many contemporary espionage pictures do, with men at laptops being interrupted by men with guns: In Dubai, a covert intelligence outpost is infiltrated by a small posse of men with high-caliber fast-shooting weapons. Their stolid, silver-haired commander has given only one instruction: “No hesitation.” The carnage is considerable.

And so, Wendell Pierce as an intelligence leader, James Greer, heads to New York’s Greenwich Village to track down Jack Ryan, a onetime intelligence analyst-turned-reluctant field operative. When he finds him, he’s jogging — but he also runs a hedge fund.

Author Tom Clancy’s original conception of the Jack Ryan character was that of a patriotic Everyman whose reticence about getting into James Bond stuff was conquered by his sense of duty. This film, whose full title is “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War,” is coproduced and cowritten by actor John Krasinski, who played Jack on an Amazon Prime series, but makes his feature debut in the role here. He has little definition beyond an enviable standard of living before he’s pulled back into action.

Partnered with a buddy, Mike November (Michael Kelly), the two joke about their ostensible assignment: “You and I both know it’s never meeting a guy.” Among the figures they do meet is Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller), who delivers some unsavory facts about the people Jack is working for.

The director, Andrew Bernstein, keeps the globe-trotting plot, which Krasinski formulated with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (“A House of Dynamite”), galloping along until a final reckoning back where all the nastiness started. Take a guess what Jack says to the bad guy once they meet face to face.