John Krasinski takes the lead as Jack Ryan: Ghost War joins the movie boxset based on Tom Clancy’s character. Here’s our review. A drone flies up to the sky, absorbing the scenery. Dubai sparkles under the camera lens, as if selected specifically by the local tourist board. It looks beautiful, only mildly inconvenienced by the ... Jack Ryan: Ghost War review | The first Ryan feature film in 12 years
John Krasinski takes the lead as Jack Ryan: Ghost War joins the movie boxset based on Tom Clancy’s character. Here’s our review.
A drone flies up to the sky, absorbing the scenery. Dubai sparkles under the camera lens, as if selected specifically by the local tourist board. It looks beautiful, only mildly inconvenienced by the fact that a new Jack Ryan film is getting in the way of the advertisement. Elsewhere, Uber Eats remain keen to sell its wares, but a bit of espionage keeps getting in the way. A luxurious airline offers its seats. A close-up of a watch fills our gaze. John Krasinski weaves in and out, skilfully, trying to advance the plot.
This is, then, the first film adventure for Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan catalogue since Kenneth Branagh’s ultimately unsuccessful Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit in 2014. In the guise of John Krasinski, Ryan has been keeping the world safe across four seasons of a Prime TV show, but now he follows Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford (twice), Ben Affleck and Chris Pine in taking the character to feature length.
Much has changed since we saw Ryan last, not least that Prime Video wasn’t even a thing. As such, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War – to give it its full title – has a fairly clear run. Working from a script by Krasinski and Noah Oppenheim (with Aaron Rabin also getting a story credit), we meet a Jack Ryan having left the CIA, yet lured back in at the behest of Wendell Pierce’s James Greer.
The plot behind this centres on a conspiracy, and people who seem to know more than they should. No spoilers here, although as someone who didn’t sit through the 30 episodes of the TV show preceding this, I did continually feel that I was missing all sorts of back references that might just have deepened the story. Also, as someone who’s very familiar with all the films to date, I was meeting characters and plot ideas that I felt had been covered before, better (they even end up in an Irish pub again here. It doesn’t have the late Richard Harris in it this time, but it does overload on traditional Irish music).
What I wasn’t getting was anything anywhere near as tense as, say, the print running out of paper in Clear And Present Danger.
Assessing Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War for what it is rather than what it isn’t, Krasinski is clearly the key asset. An eminently watchable screen presence, they’ve been smart enough to cast this with strong performers around him, too. Sienna Miller and Wendell Pierce the standouts for me. I like this ensemble, and would happily go back and watch more of them.
Not, though, if everything was as paper thin and undercooked as we get it here.
On the one hand, resources have clearly been poured in. We go from Dubai, to the US, to London, but it’s all so obvious. Take a look at how London is presented in, say, Slow Horses. There’s a show that finds familiar cities and presents the dark edges of them in a compelling way. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War just gives you, well, London.
There’s little that feels cinematic about it. Sequences taking place in governmental offices are shot wide, very well lit, and feature human beings holding their arms down by their sides, talking. Sequences that require more scale look a little too modest: someone’s certainly skimped on hiring extras, and I’m left thinking that Ryan is trying to protect the most sparsely populated areas of major locations.
The script too veers very much in the direction of explain-y. We’re told and told again about one character who risked everything, and I was half tempted to send Jack a text telling him I’d got the message. Meanwhile, as good actors do their best with not particularly inspiring material, the camera overtly and obviously fixes on the logo of a major brand sponsor.
It’s an exercise more than a film, this. Andrew Bernstein, directing, is no hack, but I can’t help but feel he’s constrained to what he has to do, over what he wants to. It feels a bit like a feature film made on a television schedule, where the Dubai Tourist Board in particular got to have some degree of script approval. In the meantime, presumably, Amazon hangs onto the Tom Clancy rights, and looks forward to further Jack Ryan adventures.
There’s a heavy sense of it’ll do about this. Consider, though, that four of the Jack Ryan films comfortably stand up as intelligent, tense, well-made blockbuster movies. Even the weakest, from 2014, throws in interesting moments, a sequence with Branagh’s villain shot almost like a stage play instantly springs to mind.
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War will, ironically enough, likely be watched more than any of them on original release, and maybe convince people to go back to the TV series that preceded it. But as much as Ryan is your man when it comes to sinister malevolent forces trying to kill us, he’s less able at fighting the usual cliches and material you can second guess some way in advance.
Amazon, of course, also now owns the screen rights to James Bond. I’d suggest this latest Jack Ryan has not set a high bar for 007 to vault over. I’d also suspect we’re three Jack Ryan movies away from an Amazon ‘buy now’ button appearing over the product placement…
