Who is Jack Ryan?
The superspy character created by author Tom Clancy has been played by four different actors in five different movies since 1990, and now he’s the title character of a new Amazon series (premiering August 31), played by yet another actor, The Office’s John Krasinski. He’s probably the closest thing there is to an American James Bond, and yet there’s very little that makes him distinctive, at least over the course of his various onscreen appearances. Unfortunately, the new series is perhaps Ryan’s most generic depiction to date, with storylines that aren’t directly based on any of Clancy’s novels, or even the novels that have been written by others since Clancy’s death in 2013.
Like the most recent Ryan movie, 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit starring Chris Pine, the new series goes back to Ryan’s earlier days, when he’s been working as a CIA analyst for just a few years and has minimal experience in the field. Of course, it only takes half an episode for Ryan to be on the ground, pointing guns at bad guys and finding himself conveniently in place when things go south. Here, he’s tracking a Lebanese-Syrian terrorist mastermind named Mousa Suleiman (Ali Suliman), who’s pretty much interchangeable with any of the dozens of Middle Eastern terrorist villains who’ve shown up on TV espionage dramas in the last 20 years.
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Aside from some strong language and occasional brief nudity, there’s not much separating Jack Ryan from a CBS drama like SEAL Team. It doesn’t have the sophistication and complexity of the early seasons of Homeland or the propulsive intensity of the Matt Damon-starring Bourne movies, two clear influences. Ryan has a semi-tortured past thanks to his years in the Marines, but for the most part, he’s blandly upstanding, the kind of guy who does the right thing no matter what... even if he has to break some rules or challenge his superior officers in the process. There isn’t much of a supporting cast around him, either, aside from his supervisor James Greer (The Wire’s Wendell Pierce), who’s wary at first but eventually learns to trust Ryan’s boringly consistent instincts.
Creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland expand the narrative by devoting nearly equal time to Suleiman and his family, but those subplots contain equally familiar beats from other terrorist thrillers, and the flashbacks that come in later episodes only repeat details that were already made clear in earlier exposition. The show works hard to build up Suleiman as a more advanced type of terrorist mastermind, but even as the wider implications of his plan become clear, they aren’t any different from what villains in countless action movies have already planned.
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The creators struggle to give Ryan’s love interest, epidemiologist Cathy Muller (Abbie Cornish), a meaningful role beyond just hooking up with Ryan, and her eventual connection to the terrorist plot is pretty contrived. A later subplot about an American drone pilot (John Magaro) who intersects with Ryan’s mission at numerous points becomes more and more far-fetched as the season goes on. It often feels like the writers are stalling for time so they can fill out the eight-episode season, in contrast to the previous Ryan stories told in feature films.
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John Krasinski proved himself capable of carrying an action movie in Michael Bay’s 2016 film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which actually helped get him the part as Ryan (Bay is a producer, here). But he’s better as part of an ensemble, and his Ryan is a little too subdued to make for a compelling action hero (although Krasinski has made himself more than sufficiently physically imposing, with his newly bulked-up physique). As far as the various screen Ryans go, Krasinski is about even with Pine and Ben Affleck (of 2002’s The Sum of All Fears), but he still doesn’t measure up to Harrison Ford, who played Ryan in 1992’s Patriot Games and 1994’s Clear and Present Danger, and whose portrayal has been cited by the show’s producers as a direct inspiration for the show.
Pierce brings a certain appealing world-weariness to Greer that makes him more interesting than the morally righteous Ryan, and anyone who’s seen him as Bunk Moreland on The Wire knows how great he is at expressing exhausted resignation at the sad state of the world. Cornish does her best with very little as Cathy, and Suliman is menacing as the villain, even if all the efforts to give him depth never make him more than one-dimensional. Marie-Josée Croze makes an impression as an acerbic French government agent (and has more chemistry with Krasinski than Cornish does), but the show drops her just as her character is getting interesting.
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Amazon clearly spared no expense in the show’s production; it has the globe-trotting settings and big action sequences of a major feature film, including some suspenseful chases and stand-offs. The episodes all end with cliffhangers designed to encourage furious bingeing, and at least most of them don’t run on too long (many are around the same length as broadcast TV episodes), which is a problem that plagues far too many prestige dramas. However, the truth is Jack Ryan isn’t really a prestige drama, and despite its high-profile source material, star and platform (a second season has already been ordered), its narrative ambitions are pretty basic. Judged by those modest standards, it achieves what it sets out for itself, but it could have managed the same effect with any character at all. Jack Ryan himself remains a cipher.