After 4 successful seasons, Amazon decided to expand the Jack Ryan TV series into a movie. With all its cast and creative talents returning, one would expect that a movie version would be something more cinematic and thrilling. Sadly, this version of a Jack Ryan movie sits near the bottom of my ranking when comparing to the previous Jack Ryan movies.

Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) has retired from the CIA and is working and living in NYC for a hedge fund investment company. One morning while out jogging, he was interrupted by some goons, and it turns out those goons work for his former boss, James Greer (Wendell Pierce). Greer wants Jack to come back and work for the government again. Jack, of course, said no, but Greer convinced him to do a favor when he travels to Dubai for a business meeting. The favor is to meet and pick up an item from Greer’s contact, Nigel (Douglas Hodge). Greer also brought in Jack’s sidekick Mike (Michael Kelly) to help on the mission. Once Jack met with Nigel, things didn’t turn out as smoothly as Greer had promised. An assassin killed Nigel, and Jack ran into an MI6 agent, Emma (Sienna Miller), who also wanted a meeting with Nigel. With Emma’s help, both Jack and Mike were able to escape the local Dubai authority.

Once in a hideout, Emma tells Jack that Greer had lied to him. Nigel was part of Greer’s team back during the Gulf War, and their mission was to take out all the leaders of the terrorist groups in the Middle East. One of their team members, Liam (Max Beeley), decided to go rogue and continue the mission to this day. Both Greer and Nigel have been trying to stop Liam, but they keep failing. Jack was not happy being lied to but has no choice but to come back into action once Liam decided to attack Greer and put everyone’s lives in danger.

The screenplay is credited to Aaron Rabin and John Krasinski, and it’s a very generic spy action thriller script that’s been done way too many times in other film series like Mission: Impossible and James Bond. There are so many Jack Ryan novels that they could take inspiration from, but doing another story about rogue agents who want to take down the government is lame. While the TV series didn’t exactly adapt any of Tom Clancy’s novels, they took inspiration from some of them. The story lacks good tension or exciting elements; everything is predictable. Another weakness in the movie is the lame villain. Liam is supposed to be this big baddie, but he didn’t do anything to make us think that he’s unstoppable.

Bringing the script to the screen is director Andrew Bernstein, and he did a fine job. The script is lackluster, so I don’t blame him for the movie being kind of boring. While it looks like Amazon put some money into the production, the movie didn’t really have any big and epic action scenes. There’s a very good car chase through the streets of London, but that’s the only impressive set piece that looked cinematic. A climactic shootout inside a building in Dubai looked like something from a cheap action TV show.

The performances by the main leads were fine. Krasinski is serviceable as Ryan, but he’s not the true Jack Ryan to me; Alec Baldwin will always be the perfect Jack Ryan. I don’t buy Miller as an MI6 agent, but I’m glad they didn’t make her character into a love interest for Ryan. This is a pure work partnership between the two characters.

The movie was shot before the current mess in the Middle East. I assume some investors from Dubai invested a lot of money into the production. There were so many shots of Dubai’s landscapes that it looked like a travel guide for the city. Heck, it makes me want to visit the city again. I planned to vacation in Dubai later this year, but with all that stuff going on in the area, I had no choice but to cancel.

There are 6 Jack Ryan movies so far, and I would rank this one just above The Sum of All Fears, the worst one in the series to me. The cliché and lackluster script are very surprising to me, because there are tons of elements from Tom Clancy’s novels that they could adapt from. Of course, the movie did end with a promise of more Jack Ryan adventures. If that happens, hopefully they can come up with a better script or just adapt a story from one of Clancy’s novels.

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