Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War

Though it may be small comfort, when it comes to onscreen catharsis in 2026, you could do a whole lot worse than the spectacle of Harrison Ford giving the President of the United States a proper telling off in the Oval Office. With stony righteousness, Ford demands accountability from the leader of the free world for his overseas malfeasance and the dirty deals made to cover his tracks. It’s not much, but in the current, scared-stiff Hollywood ecosystem, it at least feels like something akin to a point of view. Here’s a big money spy actioner – 1994’s Clear and Present Danger, to be exact, at the time only the third movie to centre Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan – declaring that the United States government ought never to be above the law, and all those who think otherwise will be promptly on the receiving end of the scalding Ford glower. Come the midway point of Jack Ryan: Ghost War, a new feature-length extension of the four-season Prime Video series, CIA deputy director James Greer (Wendell Pierce) takes a stand of his own. It’s true that he and his cohorts have taken extreme measures in their time. Hell, when it comes down to it, Greer’s methods may make him no better than the enemy. But perhaps, he proposes, you ought to try walking a day in his shoes. His are the forces holding the gates of hell closed! If you worked day in and day out at so punishing and seemingly futile a task, would you take kindly to finding that the actions you’ve taken in service of this duty are not up to the moral standards of a timidly righteous handful of pencil-pushers? Well, perhaps those people ought to get a look at just what happens when those gates are flung open!

It’s a speech that would’ve felt archaic well before the Trump administration and the war in Iran, perhaps even before Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty back in 2012. If revisiting Bigelow’s post-9/11 manhunt thriller today feels like a form of time travel to the Obama era, then watching Jack Ryan: Ghost War feels like witnessing a cryogenically frozen import from another space-time continuum, one where our last and best hope is still good old-fashioned American boy scout heroism to temper the cutthroat inclinations of those in power. With manful, sentimental fervour, Greer concludes that maybe the real difference between the United States and its enemies is guys like Jack (John Krasinski) and their “goddamn moral compass”, guys who will use said moral compass to ensure that the US can, perhaps, make a return to the honeyed, nostalgic time where it could carry out its shady overseas machinations and still steal a moment or two of righteous cool doing it. The movie even coins another visual metaphor (the script, co-written by Krasinski and Aaron Rabin, has plenty) for such people: they’re the ones holding the spears, ever ready to puncture the darkness and let the light in. In all its misty-eyed naivete, the sentiment feels entirely detached from the reality of our everyday hellscape, and whether that’s charmingly quaint or just insulting may be dependent on the eye and mood of the beholder.

One supposes Jack would indeed be the best guy for so noble a job. Over five previous film appearances, he’s proven to lack Bond’s supersized self-regard, Bourne’s death wish and Ethan Hunt’s Messianic megalomania. He’s a size-fits-all kind of hero, adaptable enough to have leading men as disparate as Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine and the aforementioned Harrison Ford all take a turn in the saddle, and in the pleasantly nondescript Krasinski, he may have achieved his Ultimate Form. Krasinski’s Jack Ryan will throw out a wisecrack or two, but never seem like he’s having an inappropriate amount of fun with the whole world-saving business. He’ll furrow his brow with the seriousness of the situation, but never so much as to dampen the mood. He’ll talk just enough smack to his superiors to get them to respect his ironclad integrity and superhuman competence, and he’ll be found jogging in the park in his spare time. In short, he has vanishingly few characteristics at all, an ideal projection board. We never really believe a guy like this, spear in hand, will come around to save our bacon offscreen, but we trust we’re in safe hands for his movie’s duration, at least.

Ryan’s latest romp concerns a blast from Greer’s past that will largely see the gang (also including Michael Kelly’s CIA wise-cracker and a British agent played by Sienna Miller, both on hand to deliver agreeably anodyne banter between shootouts) shuffling back-and-forth between London and Dubai, with the latter duly flattered as “one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world” for its trouble. There’s a most villainous villain to pursue (Max Beesley), cars to crash, and plenty of expositional stopgaps that will allow one to comfortably continue apace with chores whilst streaming the movie on Prime. None of it is actively unpleasant; indeed, one imagines fans of the show will be largely satisfied with a job slickly and efficiently done in just 105 minutes. Still, a job so focused on delivering an undemanding time can leave little flavour behind it. Jack Ryan: Ghost War‘s meagre ambitions do not extend to lingering long in the memory.

Ultimately, this new instalment of the Prime Video franchise is capably assembled and effortlessly watchable. Its ideological vapidity really ought not to matter so much, but it renders Andrew Bernstein’s film an awkward blend. Ghost War is equally an unmistakable product of the streaming era and an antique paean to old-timey American heroic values that feel of another era altogether. Mileage will vary on whether the result is an appealing escape from the current age of disillusionment, or a movie wholly ill-equipped to meet it.