John Krasinski is a great Jack Ryan. “Ghost War” is not a great Jack Ryan movie.
The distinction becomes clear fairly early in “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War,” Prime Video’s feature-length continuation to its 2018-2023 series “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” which brings Krasinski back to a role he’s now played longer than anyone else. The film aims to scale things up with bigger stakes, a broader canvas and more immediate danger. But in doing so, it loses sight of what made this version of the character work.
As the show repeatedly reminded us, it’s not easy being Jack Ryan. That’s been the throughline from the start, and “Ghost War” mostly follows the same template. Having retired from the CIA, Ryan is pulled back in after the re-emergence of a rogue black-ops network known as Starling. Soon enough, he’s ricocheting between the U.S., U.K. and UAE alongside Mike November (Michael Kelly), Jim Greer (Wendell Pierce) and MI6 officer Emma Marlowe (Sienna Miller), trying to stop an enemy that always seems one step ahead.
Even as the film leans more heavily into action, it doesn’t entirely lose sight of what makes Ryan distinct. He’s still the smartest person in the room, connecting dots others miss and pausing just long enough to question what everyone else takes for granted. The screenplay doesn’t always foreground that quality, even with Krasinski sharing scripting duties, but he never loses it as a performer.
Series vet Andrew Bernstein does a workmanlike job as director, but for a franchise once shaped by filmmakers like John McTiernan and Phil Noyce, the lack of visual personality stands out. There’s nothing approaching the slow-burn tension of the convoy ambush in “Clear and Present Danger,” with its careful build from unease into violence. Here, the action often feels like a box to check before everyone moves on to the next briefing room.
Which is fine, mostly. The problem is that “Ghost War” mistakes escalation for depth.
The show understood that Jack Ryan’s intellect was his greatest asset. The tension came from watching a fundamentally decent analyst navigate systems built on secrecy and compromise. It had room for politics, procedure and disagreement. Those elements mattered.
At 105 minutes, “Ghost War” is sliced so thin that it rarely leaves room for the smaller moments that once gave the series its texture. Conversations, doubts and political maneuvering are hurried along in service of the next plot beat, while conspiracies and betrayals pile up too quickly to fully land.
Yet the character never fully gets lost beneath all of it. Krasinski’s Ryan thinks first, even when the film pushes him otherwise. A brief moment where he pauses mid-operation to process a discrepancy ends up being one of the movie’s most satisfying moments. It’s a reminder that Ryan’s value comes from understanding the room better than anyone else in it, even if he’d rather not be there at all.
The actor understands this instinctively, as do his co-stars.
Wendell Pierce continues to give the franchise its soul, his scenes with Ryan carrying the easy familiarity and shorthand of two men who’ve spent years cleaning up impossible messes together (“Walking away from the darkness isn’t the same as walking into the light,” Greer tells him at one point).
Michael Kelly, meanwhile, remains the secret weapon of this corner of the Ryanverse, bringing a convincing world-weariness to a man far too familiar with the mechanics of espionage. And Sienna Miller smartly underplays Marlowe, giving the character enough intelligence and skepticism to feel like more than another stock “mysterious ally” with murky motives.
Still, this feels like a story that wanted to be a season.
That’s the irony of “Ghost War.” It exists because the show worked, yet the shift to a feature strips away many of its strengths. Where there was room to explore consequences and relationships, now arcs are compressed into a handful of glances before the next set piece. The lack of accumulation catches up in the final stretch when the third act commits a more surprising sin than excess or confusion: it’s boring.
It’s especially telling when you consider that 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears” builds to a climactic text exchange between Ryan and the Russian premier and wrings more tension from that conversation than “Ghost War” manages with all its explosions, gunfire and collapsing infrastructure.
And yet there’s still something inherently watchable about this iteration of Jack Ryan.
When the series premiered in 2018, it could have felt like a relic. Instead, it found a way to modernize Clancy’s character from his 1980s origins without losing his essential decency. Through four seasons of world-spanning crises, this Ryan remained grounded in the belief that intelligence and morality can coexist.
That feels especially valuable right now. In a landscape crowded with antiheroes and cynics, Ryan still wants to do the right thing. Not because he’s naïve, but because he knows what happens when people stop trying.
“Ghost War” gestures toward those ideas without fully committing to them, ultimately landing somewhere near 2013’s “Shadow Recruit” on the Jack Ryan quality scale: perfectly watchable, occasionally compelling and still a long way from the franchise at its best. Even the title carries a kind of placeholder quality, lacking the evocative intrigue that once defined this franchise.
Krasinski still feels like Jack Ryan. You just wish the movie around him did too.
“Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War” premieres Wednesday on Prime Video.
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