Amazon Prime Movie Review: Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War

The latest installment of the Jack Ryan movie series on Amazon Prime, this time around is a two hour movie, not a series. It is a great example of producers trying to "squeeze as much money out of the rock" for a well known name and franchise that I have ever seen.

The character of Jack Ryan started in 1990, starring Alec Baldwin in "The Hunt for Red October", and spawned two very good movies movies, "Patriot Games" (1992) and "Clear and Present Danger (1994) starring Harrison Ford, "The Sum of All Fears" (2002) starring Ben Affleck, "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" (2014) and the current one, streaming now on Amazon Prime, "Jack Ryan Ghost War" (2026) starring John Krasinski. Krasinski also starred in 4 seasons of Jack Ryan in Prime in 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023.

This story grabs all that works in the previous Jack Ryan series, starting with the long time close friendship between Jack Ryan, played by Krasinski James Greer, played by Wendell Pierce where there are scenes of their affection and respect for one another and intense arguments, due to new revelations about cases they have worked on in the past. There are well done scenes of massive gunfire, car chases and shootouts inside of buildings and cars blowing up. This movie also stars Sienna Miller who plays an MI6 agent Emma Marlow and Max Beesley as Liam Crown who is the evil leader of a criminal organization.

The problem is that there is nothing new in this movie that we have seen so many times before in the four Prime series and the previous five movies. In the rush to make more money in the Jack Ryan series, the realization that name recognition would probably mean that less time would be necessary to write an interesting and innovative screenplay. People will probably want to stream this new movie because of the name "Jack Ryan", no need to take 18 months to write and then re-write a new screenplay. Lets make money now.

This unfortunate, slap together a story and then rush to production is the number one reason why this movie is getting such low marks on Rotten Tomatoes of 45%. I agree with this rating and do not recommend this movie. You are better off watching the older movies or the early Jack Ryan series.