Condensed Idiocy

I struggle to understand the thought process behind the creation of Jack Ryan: Ghost War (or, if you want to be truly pedantic, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War), a filmic spin-off of Amazon Prime’s Jack Ryan series, which ended three years ago. That series was supposed to be followed up by continuations in the form of Rainbow Six, spinning out Michael Peña's Ding Chavez into his own Ryanverse of adventures. And then there was also Without Remorse, a poorly received film starring Michael B. Jordan that, also, is supposed to get a sequel called Rainbow Six. And yet, somehow, we have a continuation of Jack Ryan and, well, I’m not sure why.

Look, Jack Ryan was never very good. I somehow managed to watch my way through it and the best I can say about it is that the series was competently made and the action was decent. Nothing about the series was memorable or interesting, and even star John Krasinski felt like he was going through the motions most of the time. His charisma is strong and he was able to carry the television show with a smile or a serious look and it kind of worked. Most of the time, though, it was tediously paced and its stories were ridiculous. It’s not the kind of show I would think you could build an entire universe around, and the fact that any spin-offs, outside one bad movie, have failed to materialize seems to prove that.

And yet, here we are with a second bad movie. Jack Ryan: Ghost War doesn’t feel like a necessary film. It’s a movie that exists solely to reestablish the status quo, to retcon and reboot what just came before, to reset the character we knew through four seasons so he can continue to go off on adventures despite the conclusion of the television series seemingly indicating otherwise. What is the Ryanverse without Dr. Ryan? Amazon seemed poised to explore that idea but, more than anything, Jack Ryan: Ghost War indicates that there are no fresh ideas to be had here. Instead, in truncated form, we’re simply going to keep doing these same adventures over and over again until it’s no longer even marginally profitable anymore.

Made on an unreported budget (that one has to assume was mostly made up via Cisco product placement and healthy kickbacks from the Dubai government), Jack Ryan: Ghost War finds our hero, Dr. Ryan (Krasinski), living the civilian life as a consultant for a Wall Street firm (pointedly we never learn the name of that company in the film). However, he’s pulled back into the shit, so to speak, when his old friend, Deputy Director of the CIA James Greer (Wendell Pierce), asks him for a “quick” favor. Since Jack is headed to Dubai for a meeting anyway, Greer just needs him to meet with a contact and pick up a package. Simple… except nothing ever is.

At this meeting the contact, senior MI6 officer Nigel Cooke (Douglas Hodge), is killed and whatever package he had was nowhere to be found. Ryan and his associate, CIA contractor Mike November (Michael Kelly), are picked up by MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller), and suddenly Ryan is forced back into action, working for the CIA and MI6 to figure out what’s going on and why Cooke was killed. And it all seemingly traces back to a program Greer himself used to head up, the anti-terrorist Project Starling, which someone else is now running and using for their own, nefarious ends…

The biggest issue I had with Jack Ryan: Ghost War was that, from start to finish, I never really understood why I was supposed to care about anything going on in the film. The villain, Greer’s former associate Liam Crown (Max Beesley), is a barely sketched bad guy whose motivation seems incredibly murky. He’s vaguely about fighting the dangers of the world and showing that programs like Starling are needed, but considering he’s the only terrorist actually doing anything in the film, his righteous attitude falls pretty flat. “We need Starling to protect us,” is pretty hollow when he’s running Starling and causing all the problems.

Crown’s actions would have more impact if he did anything that actually seemed dangerous, like attacking a major target or taking out someone of value beyond our insular group of characters. But that would require fleshing out the story and expanding the budget for the film, two things the movie clearly couldn’t do. This is a made-for-television film made on a television budget and it shows. All the actors are regulars from Jack Ryan television series or C-list performers hired on the cheap, all talking about how dangerous Crown is while all the action takes place in empty landmarks far from anything expensive.

I’m not even certain expanding the budget would really help matters, though. Sure, the caliber of acting would be stronger and the action would be more explosive (what we get here is pretty far from exciting, to say the least), but that would all be in service to a story that really doesn’t make much sense. Reading up on Jack Ryan: Ghost War, it seems like the plot for the film was inspired by the story from The Sum of All Fears (the book, not the movie of the same name that actually took very little from the book), which was about terrorist organizations pooling their resources to prove a point to America. I kind of get what Tom Clancy was going for there, but it’s all watered down to irrelevancy in this milquetoast, “America, rah rah,” dad rock movie. This film has nothing to say about America, terrorists, or the state of the world. It just wants to trot Ryan out so he can shoot some bad guys and, vaguely, look cool.

All the film really does is illustrate how pretty Dubai is, which is actually pretty shocking considering the story it’s supposedly trying to tell. This is supposed to be about evils perpetrated by America’s enemies, and yet a good fifty percent of this film is a travel advertisement for the United Arab Emirates, a government that has perpetrated some pretty serious evil over the last few years (there’s a whole Wikipedia entry on the human rights violations of the UAE). None of that comes up here, likely because the UAE paid a lot of money for Jack Ryan: Ghost War to be filmed in Dubai to make the city look attractive and make the government look awesome.

All of this waters down the already watered-down message of Jack Ryan: Ghost War. As the characters talk about the danger the world is in, running from place to place and faffing around while the villain seemingly (and stupidly) is always one step ahead of them, it never feels like anything really sticks. Is this supposed to be a serious political thriller? If so, then the film actually has to engage with its politics. If this is supposed to be a big, dumb action flick then it really needs to nail the action. The film never finds its footing, or commits to anything, instead wasting all its time (and ours) on a repetitive and lame adventure that no one asked for.

The best I can think is that, after three years of trying to get any other spin-off going, Paramount and Amazon eventually said, “we’ve got to do something or we’ll lose the rights to the franchise.” So they threw some money at the day players, looked for any countries willing to throw the studios some lucrative kickbacks, and then threw together this film as quickly as they could. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why Jack Ryan: Ghost War exists.

Certainly it wasn’t to actually give fans of the character a good film to watch because Jack Ryan: Ghost War is far from that. It’s a tedious mess that didn’t need to be made, and all it really does is drag down a franchise that was, by this point, already running on fumes.