Jack Ryan: Ghost War review – Nothing more than a bland TV movie | “There isn’t much to lift the spirits in this feature length spin-off starring John Krasinski as the iconic CIA agent.”

>He may be a long way from Alec Baldwin, who played Ryan in The Hunt for Red October (1990), or Harrison Ford, who starred as the character in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). But Krasinski’s easy-going charm means the show’s return fared a lot better than either Ben Affleck (in 2002’s The Sum of All Fears) or Chris Pine (2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) playing Ryan.

>Sadly, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War – what a mouthful of a title that is – emerges as a bland action vehicle shorn of wit or vitality. This comes as a huge surprise given that Krasinski and Noah Oppenheim (who penned Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant nuclear thriller A House of Dynamite) cooked up the story. In the past, Krasinski has more than proved his mettle as a screenwriter (and director) of the gripping horror A Quiet Place and its sequel, which makes the failure of this globe-trotting espionage tale all the more puzzling.

Not surprising. The show started off pretty good but then devolved into the usual “every-man suddenly becomes a one-man wrecking machine bent on saving the Country/World.”

All the actors seemed fully-capable of delivering something good, too bad they never had good enough scripts to showcase what this show could be. At least the Reacher series goes full-bore unapologetically like the books and leans-in to the campiness of it all.

Jack Ryan was trying to be way more serious than the scripts were pretending to be.

Yeah man, more than ever we need heroes overcoming impossible odds in spectacular ways. If you ain’t doing that, we don’t have time for it

>But for the most part, the combat scenes feel like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, the series of action-adventure stealth video games.

Now THIS is the Tom Clancy franchise I’d love to see adapted into a live-action film.

OTOH, “bland TV movie” sounds perfect for something to have on the background as a second screen while I’m focused on the important work of Reddit posting.