Tom Clancy, the prolific author of bestsellers about war and espionage, died five years ago, but spinoffs set in the universe he created have continued to come out at a rate of about two per year, with Clancy’s name appearing more prominently than the real authors’ names and the titles of the books. Even in death, it seems, Tom Clancy won’t slow down.
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan never stops running, either—even to let its characters catch a breath and explain themselves to one another. Across Europe, the Middle East, and back at home in the United States, they are a blur of constant motion. Jack Ryan—now played by John Krasinski, best known for his years on NBC’s The Office—is an updated version of the character Clancy created in his first book, The Hunt for Red October, back in 1984. In the original Cold War novels, Ryan began as a CIA analyst dragged despite himself into bullets-flying situations involving the Soviets. In the later, post-Cold War novels, Ryan faced off against different malefactors while rising absurdly through government ranks; he eventually becomes the president of the United States. The various screen incarnations of the character—memorably played by Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, forgettably by Ben Affleck and Chris Pine—started out relatively faithful to the books but over time have increasingly been adapted to the changing world situation.
In the new Amazon series, Ryan is again a low-level CIA wonk, working in the agency’s terror, finance, and arms division. He has noticed a series of curious financial transactions involving Mousa bin Suleiman, a terror-cell leader based in Syria. Ryan bucks his new boss to cut Suleiman off from his finances—forcing Suleiman to go underground and accelerate his devious plot. Without revealing too many spoilers, the story that unfolds over the first season’s eight episodes involves the assassination of a Catholic priest in France, a church bombing, and the threat of attack by weapons of mass destruction.
If Alec Baldwin’s smart-but-bewildered Jack Ryan represented end-of-Cold-War America, and Kiefer Sutherland’s hypercompetent Jack Bauer in Fox’s decadelong hit series 24 represented the aggressive assuredness of war-on-terror America, this new take on Clancy’s character is well-suited for our moment of persistent terror threats amid uncertain international leadership. Krasinski is ill-served by writing that rarely gives his character the opportunity to think through the intelligence and reach reasoned conclusions about it. Admirers of the Clancy books and even the first three movies will recall the enormous difficulty analysts like Ryan had in hunting down actionable intelligence; one of the joys of the books and the movies was in following their laborious trail of reasoning. In Amazon’s Jack Ryan, though, we don’t get to see the thinking unfold; we just move from one hot lead to another. Krasinski’s Ryan starts out the first episode explaining a bit about what international banking transactions can reveal, but by the end of the season, he is prone to inappropriate outbursts.
Clancy’s books were not known as deep character studies. Neither is the new show, although we do get some sense of Ryan as a person: a retired Marine badly wounded in a chopper attack in Afghanistan, a former finance guy, and practically a Boy Scout when it comes to his personal integrity—which well suits Krasinski’s congenitally honest and down-to-earth demeanor. There aren’t many well-fleshed-out relationships. Ryan flirts with and starts dating a doctor (played by Abbie Cornish); her specialty in infectious diseases becomes important over the course of the show. But the most interesting relationship in the show is the one Ryan has with his new boss, Jim Greer. This character is loosely based on the Jim Greer of Clancy’s books, an admiral-turned-CIA-official depicted by James Earl Jones in the first three movies. In the Amazon series, Greer is a hard-charging intelligence official who only landed atop Ryan’s division as a demotion. He is played by a salty Wendell Pierce, best known for his years as a Baltimore detective on The Wire; Pierce brings a certain buddy-cop feel to the role of Greer. The show’s creators have decided to make Greer a convert to Islam, one of several strange wrinkles intended to highlight that culture, religion, and socioeconomic status do not point clearly to good or evil.
In the opening episodes, Ryan protests weakly when Greer whisks him across the world to join in interrogating a captured member of Suleiman’s terror cell. The Yemeni black site to which they fly embodies much of what the public has heard about in recent decades, complete with American government personnel using foreign soil (and Toby Keith music) to pry intelligence from enemy combatants. When the base comes under attack at the end of the first episode, Ryan transforms from a mild-mannered analyst into full-fledged action hero. The transition is so quick and so complete that it undermines any sense of the character as an analyst dragged into the muck. “For a guy who works behind a desk, you seem to like the field,” a French cop later tells him. “I think you have everyone fooled. I think you are a wolf.”
As an extended action flick—sustained by bursts of manic energy and little talking, shifting from crisis to crisis—Jack Ryan loses clarity of purpose. But two major subplots bring to life some of the strange and sad aspects of the fight against terrorism.
In one, we see a drone operator based outside Las Vegas grappling with his profession. Victor Polizzi (John Magaro) is troubled by the deadly strikes he executes on the other side of the globe. He and one of his operator buddies have a deal in which she gives him a buck for each successful strike; he now has more than a hundred. Depressed and drinking, he takes all these dollar bills and gambles with them—surreally making $29,000. After a sexual misadventure, he returns to work a few days later to find that one of his successful strikes was really just an innocent man going about his day in Syria; Polizzi must bear the burden of having killed this man and taken him from his family. Collateral damage is addressed in Jack Ryan as alternately necessary-but-evil or soul-destroying, depending on how great the potential harm; for Polizzi, this grim incident is in the latter category.
The other subplot involves Suleiman’s wife, Hanin (Dina Shihabi). Focused on protecting her children from her husband and his underlings, she flees the family compound with some of her kids only to find that life as a refugee does not carry the same privileges as wife of an important terrorist. A distraught Suleiman sends fighters to recover Hanin, one of whom attempts to assault her. Hanin’s subplot and Polizzi’s intertwine and then connect to the main Ryan-Greer storyline in a series of grim moral compromises that eventually has Ryan facing off with a Turkish sex trafficker. “You don’t like me,” he says to Ryan. “You think you’re the good guy, I’m the bad guy. Maybe you’re right. But maybe, if I was born in a nice city in America. . . . I could be the good guy, too. Geography is destiny.”
This comment could stand as a summary of this season’s take on radicalism: Had villains not been born where they were, they too could be redeemed. This morally equivocal emphasis on characters being determined by their surroundings is a disservice to the longstanding premise of Clancy’s Jack Ryan. In the better novels and films, Ryan makes his transformation from analyst to hero not because he is a good shot or is willing to make morally messy decisions, but because he is smart, well-trained, and seeks to understand the motivations and desires of an apparent foe like Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October. This new Jack Ryan rarely comes close to that standard.
As an action thriller, Jack Ryan features impressive stunt work; as a Clancy-inspired series, it features lots of technical language. The show is enhanced, at least for viewers on computers and handheld devices, by Amazon’s “X-Ray” function, which brings up a sidebar filled with trivia related to the plot and the production. For other movies and shows the X-Ray function can feel like a distraction, but it is weirdly well suited to this show packed with the kind of technical phrases and terms that Clancy’s books had room to explain at length.
For the first few episodes, Jack Ryan is arguably the closest in spirit that audiences have come to a Tom Clancy novel adaptation. But as the action rises, the dialogue degrades and Ryan becomes much less interesting than supporting characters on either side of the action. The secret sauce of Tom Clancy’s original Jack Ryan comes when he is interested in not only what his foe is doing but why. John Krasinski makes a fine action hero and Wendell Pierce is an excellent boss-sidekick, but the first season disappoints in its failure to showcase Jack Ryan as a thinker and not just a man of action. As Amazon prepares for the show’s second season, already ordered, the writers would do well to remember that Jack Ryan has real brains, not just brawn.
