Directed by: Andrew Bernstein
Starring: John Krasinski, Sienna Miller, Michael Kelly, Wendell Pierce, Max Beesley
I've seen the Jack Ryan movies The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and even Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. They're all significantly better than Jack Ryan: Ghost War, which resembles every other boilerplate, cookie-cutter, made-for-streaming action movie we've seen in the past decade. I never saw the Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime and nothing about Jack Ryan: Ghost War make me want to circle back and watch the series. Although to my relief, I didn't feel like I was lost in the plot because I never viewed the original show.
Jack Ryan (Krasinski) is a former CIA analyst who, as the movie opens, is now working on Wall Street in the private sector when he is approached by his former boss Admiral Greer (Pierce) to act as a courier somewhere in Europe and retrieve top secret items from a spy. Naturally, this doesn't go as planned, and Jack is dragged back in to a world of violence and CIA secrets in which Greer took part many moons ago, much to the horror of Jack, who doesn't seem to realize he works for that CIA. Along for the ride is MI-6 agent Emma Marlow (Miller), who must go through three packs a day and it's refreshing when she isn't holding a cigarette or puffing on one. Vaping is just as dangerous to your health, but I heard it's more aesthetically pleasing albeit not as cinematic.
The movie is complete with a military-style rum-de-dum-dum score and digital readouts of where the action is taking place (i.e. CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia) scrolling across the bottom left corner of the screen complete with scroll sound effects. It's not exactly revolutionary, and doesn't need to be, but Jack Ryan: Ghost War seems to be putting itself and us through the motions with as little depth as possible. We've seen this all before, and done better.
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