Director: Andrew Bernstein
Writers: Aaron Rabin, John Krasinski
Stars: John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, Michael Kelly
Synopsis: Jack Ryan reunites with CIA operatives to navigate a treacherous web of betrayal against an enemy who knows their every move, facing a past they thought was long put to rest.
The television series-to-movie pipeline seems to be in full effect this year, with Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Jack Ryan: Ghost War, which attempts to carry over what was laid out across multiple seasons of television into an isolated big-budget feature film. Unlike The Mandalorian, though, Jack Ryan: Ghost War understands that the fanbase of Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland’s televisual expansion of Tom Clancy’s best-selling novels will not go to the cinema to see John Krasinski’s grand return as Dr. John P. Ryan. As such, Andrew Bernstein’s film was released exclusively on Prime Video, and it might have saved the franchise from further damage, because it looks and feels exactly like an extended episode of one of Prime Video’s biggest series.
Bernstein is no stranger to the Ryanverse, having directed several episodes of the television show, but he doesn’t adapt the televisual language to feature-film conventions. Some may argue that since this is a straight-to-streaming movie, it doesn’t need to look like an actual film you’d see in a cinema, which is a problem in and of itself. Even if we ignore what has transformed the visual medium of cinema into television, on both the big and small screen, Jack Ryan: Ghost War doesn’t capture the cinematic thrills of John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October and Philip Noyce’s Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.
Bernstein will certainly rip off one key sequence from Patriot Games and hope the audience won’t notice, which acts as the catalyst for the film’s events, as Jack Ryan (Krasinski), having fully abandoned his life as a CIA analyst, is recruited back in after acting director James Greer (Wendell Pierce) asks him a favor. With Mike November (Michael Kelly), the two travel to Dubai to meet MI6 officer Nigel Cooke (Douglas Hodge), but are caught in an altercation with Liam Crown (Max Beesley), a black ops soldier with a close connection to Greer’s past.
Jack will have to team up with MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller) to uncover a global conspiracy related to…something? I genuinely had no idea what the movie was about, other than Crown is bad and must be stopped. I guess this is what happens when streaming “content” isn’t concerned with giving audiences something of actual substance, even if the series functions well as engaging espionage entertainment.
The movie has its fair share of effective action sequences, but it never lays out what’s most important about the plot: Jack must dismantle, or how close Greer and Crown were before the latter began engaging in rogue activities. Aaron Rabin and John Krasinski’s screenplay will certainly try to explain it via a step-printed flashback that’s far more convoluted than you’d imagine, but there isn’t a single scene – or moment – in Jack Ryan: Ghost War where we feel a sense of urgency about what’s going on.
In the fourth season of the television show, Ryan has made it very clear that he is done with working for the CIA and is pursuing a more stable life. Because we need him to return, Rabin and Krasinski come up with a half-baked explanation, while November arrives as a deus ex machina of sorts, and we’re back in business as if he never left the force in the first place. There’s no evolution in the character’s line of thinking, even if he repeats ad nauseam that he’s but a simple “civilian” now and has no connections with the CIA whatsoever. This could’ve worked if there had been a push-pull between Jack wanting to stay in New York away from the field and Greer being in legitimate danger, but there isn’t any of that.
Ryan returns to the CIA because Greer asks him to, without actually knowing why he should be the one to go to Dubai with November, even if he wants no part of this life. There’s a fine line between suspending your disbelief and narrative sense that the screenplay continually breaks, and as much as “things happen” for 107 minutes, nothing of real consequence occurs because we have no idea what’s going on. Why does Crown want to specifically target CIA director Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel, whose talents are wasted after being the best parts of seasons three and four), other than wanting to inflict pain upon Greer, even though we have no clue why Greer’s past suddenly comes to haunt him?
There is something pretty significant that happens early on in the film that pissed this critic off, because it makes no sense to commit such an act other than laying the table for a pivotal narrative turn in Clancy’s books that the series smartly avoided. However, in the interest of not giving anything away, this critic will avoid mentioning it. The action, while bountiful, is also shot and edited with zero cinematic pulse or verve. When the show has more well-mounted set pieces than a movie, regardless of whether it’s a streaming exclusive, there is a problem.
Bernstein doesn’t know where to place, block, and move the camera, nor does he understand how to edit said action. They frequently become nauseating and unimpressive. The final machine gunfight, which could’ve been tactile and genuinely thrilling, turns out to be a boring show of force that does culminate in a darkly funny kill, but takes forever to get to that explosive moment.
The movie is only watchable because John Krasinski is a great Jack Ryan. He’s probably the best iteration of the character after Harrison Ford. How he captures the character’s analytical and tactical skills so well remains compelling to this viewer, and the chemistry he shares with Pierce’s Greer and Kelly’s November never falters. It must have been daunting for Wendell Pierce to portray the character after James Earl Jones defined him in the original trilogy, but the way he’s added texture over the years and made him far more complex and three-dimensional than we thought is honestly commendable.
Miller is also a great addition to the cast, and springs into action effectively, although she’s far more underdeveloped than other female characters of the show, such as Betty Gabriel’s Wright, Abbie Cornish’s Cathy Mueller, and Nina Hoss’ Alena Kovac. Still, she’s more interesting than Beesley’s one-note Crown, a villain whom I still have no idea what his motivations are and what he was trying to accomplish. I’m usually one who doesn’t care much about plot efficiency and looks at cinema through its thematic and visual lens, but even I have my limits. He doesn’t make sense, and this entire film seems to exist only to capitalize on the Jack Ryan IP, with little to no purpose.
The new regime at Paramount, however, wants to expand upon Clancy’s Ryanverse – and do so imminently – so we might see more movies and television shows developed directly as a result. While I would certainly consider myself a fan of Clancy’s work, milking it to no end will only yield diminishing returns. If you’re only making Jack Ryan (or Ryan-adjacent) “content” just to fill the gap, you’re not going to get the audience to watch more of it. You’ll only make junk like Jack Ryan: Ghost War that people will immediately forget and wonder why they even watched it in the first place. Krasinski is a great Jack Ryan. It’s a shame the work he did for the character won’t be as fondly remembered as Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, simply because the show (and film) around him isn’t very good.
