Were you clamoring for more John Krasinski as Jack Ryan? Was anyone? Well, Prime Video certainly was. Krasinski returns as the intelligence community crusader first made famous onscreen by Harrison Ford, this time in a movie extender he co-wrote, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. With apostrophes and colons, this gobbledygook title attempts to combine original author pedigree with whatever lasting image viewers have of Jack Ryan and its four seasons on Prime. Krasinski reunites with series co-stars Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly; Sienna Miller and Max Beesley join the cast.  

TOM CLANCY’S JACK RYAN: GHOST WAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 2023, when Jack Ryan the series concluded, Jack Ryan the guy (played with a kind of athletic smarm by Krasinski) hung up his spy world shoes. He got a job in finance, or hedge funds, or financial hedge funds, or something like that, and focused on his relationship with Dr. Cathy Mueller. But on that series, Abby Cornish’s character was forever an afterthought, and an absent Cathy receives a single dismissive line of dialogue in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War, as CIA deputy director James Greer (Pierce) recruits Jack for an off-the-books mission to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “I’m not asking you to come back,” Greer says, even though he is. “I just need you to meet a guy.” 

Ghost War already showed us the mess Jack is about to walk into. Nigel (Douglas Hodge), an old MI6 contact of Greer’s, had his entire team ambushed during the attempted recovery of a tranche of secret data – files and contacts and surveillance photos for a spy network Greer says should not still exist. Old spy shit that is still getting people killed. Oh shit. You mean like…a Ghost War? 

Jack, joined as always by weapons-and-logistics guy Mike November (Kelly), finds lots of people shooting at him in Dubai. He is part of a boat chase or two, meets an ally in MI6 officer Emma Marlow (Miller), and before long the gang heads from Dubai to London. Joined by Greer and CIA Director Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel), they begin to uncover the past. Liam Crown (Beesley), former British army and MI6 officer, now a private contractor, has history with Greer. Crown thinks the kind of black bag battles guys like him and Greer used to fight should be the way things still are. “Before countries grew a conscience.” And he is determined to use violence to make his plan happen.

What exactly is Crown’s plan? Well, it involves a lot of him knowing more about the movements of major intelligence agencies than they do. It requires him to throw truckload after truckload of faceless armed goons at Jack, Emma, and Mike. And eventually, Crown’s plan will lead everyone back to the Middle East, where their ghost war continues.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is as confused and generic as its title, barely settling on what it is supposed to be searching for while featuring lots of arguments that sound sorta valid for this kind of movie – “The only reason he’s still alive is because you and I both know he shouldn’t have been there at all” – before another explosion or location shift redirects everything. The Contractor, a 2022 film starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Kiefer Sutherland, worked this same angle. It fell similarly short, too, but like Ghost War features enough talent to occasionally cover up the holes. 

Then again, you could also just watch The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. The Prime Video action series featured these same echoes of CIA darkness and elusive, violent searches for something in the present.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s a little curious how much effort Ghost War makes to include Adam Bernett as Patrick Klinghoffer, a nerdy tech guy who helped Jack and Greer with a lot of computer stuff on Jack Ryan. Is this character also getting his own standalone movie in this rebooted universe? “Patrick Klinghoffer: Ghost Daemon.” 

Sex and Skin: None. Like, less than none. Periodically, almost absentmindedly, Krasinski and Miller veer into a mildly interesting flirtation, two capable people with shared cynicism about what black bag work does to personal lives. Like Jack’s relationship with Cathy on Jack Ryan,  this goes nowhere.  

Our Take: Oh, it looks like it just rained in Trafalgar Square. My, how glittery the buildings of Dubai look at night, all lined up along the banks of the Dubai Canal. These are both examples of idle thoughts you might have while watching Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War, a movie with three compartments in its title, nothing much to say, and an outsized fixation on establishing exterior shots and surging convoys full of black SUVs driving around purposefully. The action sequences that pop up every few minutes are loud enough, and feature a lot of shattering glass and ricocheting bullets. What they don’t do is achieve anything above replacement level action television. 

We don’t necessarily dislike John Krasinski as Jack Ryan, the longtime CIA hero. We never have – he was also pretty decent in the series version of this. But we just don’t know why Prime or whoever is in charge keeps bringing all this back, if they aren’t willing to invest it with even a moment of personality. (Well, besides all the money spent on location shots.) And with Ghost War, it is not really any better with the rest of the cast. Wendell Pierce is a wonderful actor, with real gravity in his performances. Even he cannot make the Greer in Ghost War anything more than a shell. And while Sienna Miller always finds a few little moments to help us remember how perpetually underrated she is, Emma Marlow, her MI6 officer, is also more or less an empty frame. It could be anybody on this new adventure with Jack Ryan, because it’s the same old murky spy stuff adventure.

Our Call: Here’s another colon to add to Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War: SKIP IT. 

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.