John Krasinski continues his unconvincing run as the CIA analyst in a mostly unexciting and rather low-rent feature-length adventure. 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. 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 Krasinski takes over the CIA analyst role.
To its credit, the film manages to stand alone quite well despite the preceding 30 episodes of set-up. Less fortuitously, it’s more coherent than competent, especially compared with the previous movie versions. 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. Then his old boss James Greer (Wendell Pierce) resurfaces to ask Ryan for a minor favour during an upcoming business trip to Dubai. But a quick 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 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. 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. 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. 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.
Surely Ghost War must at least work as a bigger-canvas action movie? Not really. There’s a moderately entertaining car chase and some high-volume shootouts, but the film lacks the pulse-pounding story or bigger budget that might justify its existence as a movie rather than another TV episode.
