JACK RYAN: GHOST WAR – The spirit is willing, but the plot is weak…
Jack Ryan (John Kraszinski) has quit the CIA and taken up a job in the city, handling the risk assessments of finance… something distinctly less life-threatening.
But when his old boss asks for a simple favour, Ryan knows they have a habit if rapidly becoming far less simple. Sure enough when the ‘simple’ collection of information goes sideways and Jack finds himself in the middle of a shootout, it’s time to find out what’s really going on. However, James Greer (Wendell Pierce) has some problems of his own – and his past decisions may have serious, international-incident level consequences.
And, as usual, Jack Ryan might be the one who has to stay alive long enough to find the truth…
*some spoilers*
For better or/and worse, Jack Ryan: Ghost War really feels like it’s exactly what it is… a tv movie spin-off of a series that’s a spin-off of a film – maintaining some of the catnip of a franchise title that will still spike interest and then going through the motions without feeling the need to truly provide anything new. It’s not quite a case of diminishing returns, but it is a case of set your expectations accordingly.
At a time when audiences are vacillating between wanting their escapism to be something street-level or sky-high from their espionage, it has some of the cynicism of Slow Horses and the gleam of a business-class Mission Impossible budget, the double-speak of covert security agencies with seemingly limitless resources, some needed some landmark-adjacent shenanigans, but devoid of the silly latex masks and sentient AI accessories that made later impossible missions more at home in pure sci-fi than spy-fi.
The set-pieces and action-beats are from the ‘How to…‘ manual of action tropes. There are the impressive skylines (London, Washington, Dubai to satisfy audiences and investors), car-chases through suspiciously empty streets of capital cities, shoot-outs on top-level floors of under-construction skyscrapers. Ryan gets some heroic helicopter posing in at the close, but none of it beats the self-effacing first-date exit from his first outing). There’s also that singular, familiar, furrowed-brow plot-line that dictates a major American character must confess that a mistake they made years ago is finally coming back to haunt them… and it’s armed to the teeth and likely English.
Max Beesley – last seen in Idris Elba’s Hijack series as a good guy – plays the sneering antagonist Liam Crown. He’s the kind of baddie who is supposed to be a master strategist and legendary black-ops operator but one who consistently takes needless risks and amazingly manages to escape capture numerous times throughout the story, simply to keep the plot going.
Sienna Miller is fine and capable as Emma Marlow, an MI6 operative nicknamed ‘Blonde Ambition‘ drafted in to help the investigation, provide international flavour and banter with the newly-single Jack. (The series really couldn’t decide whether Jack and Doctor Dr. Cathy Mueller – played by Abbie Cornish – should be a permanent item, despite getting married and having kids in the original novels – but here she’s now definitely an unseen ‘ex’). Michael Kelly is back from the series to provide able support as Mike November, the fast-talking, sardonic wing-man to whom the script gives most of the exposition (and some cringe-worthy lines about he, Jack and Greer being like family who are always there for each other).
John Krasinski has quietly become a significant creative force – moving from the meek and mild Jim Halpert on nine seasons of the US version of The Office through to a decent action-hero in the Jack Ryan series that ran for four seasons on Amazon before this entry. Of course, he’s also directed some impressive films along the way such as A Quiet Place (with wife Emily Blunt). But the fact that he’s co-credited with the script for Ghost War really means he has to shoulder some of the blame for the bland speechifying that the characters deliver along the way.
Jack Ryan: Ghost War isn’t dreadful – it’s just formulaic, wholly acceptable as a diversion and a placeholder, emulating a ton of other spy-hard entries and rising above them solely on the budget and the familiarity with the characters – the televisual equivalent of a vacation read to be consumed quickly and in one-sitting.
7.5/10
Jack Ryan: Ghost War is now available on Amazon Prime…