Jack Ryan was never much of a character. He was a stand-in. He debuted with his creator, Tom Clancy, in the runaway success of The Hunt For Red October, which made Clancy a household name and launched him as one of the most popular American authors in the waning days of the Cold War and beyond, becoming a brand unto himself. Clancy’s work is marked by its precise knowledge of security and military apparatuses, detailed geopolitical stakes, and the author’s unflappable conservative patriotism. Clancy’s hero, Ryan, is his aspirational version of himself.
Clancy, while undoubtedly knowledgeable and surprisingly tactful at dissecting international relations, was a gruff presence, always asserting himself as the smartest guy in the room (this becomes unpleasantly clear in the commentary track for The Sum Of All Fears, where Clancy points out everything he thinks is ridiculously counterfactual in Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation). Meanwhile, Ryan is diplomatic and charming (not to mention, handsome), and can ultimately show why he’s right. In doing so, Ryan always saves the day from catastrophe.
Jack Ryan’s Boy Scout bearing is a product of Clancy’s reactionary moment: He’s a “morning again in America” hero as opposed to the cold cynicism of ’70s cops and spies in a disillusioned post-Vietnam society. Ryan is Reaganite perfection. The Hollywood that continues to adapt Clancy in 2026 moves that good ol’ boy energy into a new era, one now defined by America’s perception that it is both the dominant, balancing force in the world (judge, jury, and executioner of justice), yet simultaneously in decline.
After Alec Baldwin’s brief turn in October, Harrison Ford starred in the double bill Patriot Games and Clear And Present Danger, Ben Affleck in the interestingly misguided Sum Of All Fears, and Chris Pine in the memory-holed 2014 attempt to stop a second 9/11 (directed by Kenneth Branagh), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Four years later, the franchise would get rebooted once again, this time for TV, with creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland getting to the meat and bones by simply calling it Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.
The series, which ran for four seasons on Amazon Prime, made John Krasinski the actor with the longest-running portrayal of this malleable hero, who isn’t a character beyond a guy who says “I’m just an analyst” before saving the world. Like Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is not taken from a single book by the author (who died a year before Shadow Recruit premiered), but instead “based on” characters created by him. This gives even further latitude to adapt the author to the present.
In 2026, that looks like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. Co-written by Krasinski and A House Of Dynamite screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, Ghost War sees a recently retired Ryan coming back for one last job against an organization trying to reactivate former terrorist groups. That plot element most resembles The Sum Of All Fears—the book, not the movie. While the 2002 film concerns an Israeli nuclear weapon found in the hands of a nefarious European neo-Nazi organization, the novel sees disparate groups of the disillusioned global left (the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Irish Republican Army, American Indian Movement, etc.) bond together to try to bring down the United States and a liberalizing Russia.
Ghost War doesn’t contain anything so geopolitically specific, nor Clancy’s penchant for accurately identifying why these groups hate the American government, and instead eschews that for a simple dichotomy of order and chaos. That always underlies Clancy’s work, but the whys and hows of these situations are important for Clancy to bring some semblance of truth to his stories. Furthermore, this always unintentionally highlights just how bizarre it is that Clancy is so unflinchingly patriotic, when he’s always putting a microscope to legitimate reasons for his beloved county to be despised by so many.
What makes Krasinski’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan so thin is that it flattens these complexities for assumptions. Good guys are good and bad guys are bad in Clancy’s work, sure, but Clancy at least grounds these opposing sides in a somewhat believable real-world context. Ghost War is pure bozo pulp. It allows the audience to disengage, checking out between action sequences rather than having to chew on anything close to a geopolitical reality. It’s the narrative equivalent of the current state of American warmongering, where the government and its sycophantic mouthpieces barely even attempt to manufacture consent for foreign and domestic operations anymore. Even just a decade ago, Ryan had to justify joining a CIA that was mired in torture scandals, but now nothing even warrants a second look from the analyst. Krasinski’s co-writing credit for Ghost War implies some sort of genuine belief in the institution—as do red-carpet quotes like, “The CIA is something that we should all not only cherish, but be saying thank you for every single day”—it’s just that Krasinski isn’t very convincing in selling it.
Perhaps more telling, Krasinski’s iteration makes the propaganda of the Ryanverse explicitly read like advertising. This dumped-on-streaming film takes every chance to show the audience its Cisco-branded landlines and how beautiful and clean and (mostly) safe Dubai is. Besides the international acts of espionage and gunfights in half-finished buildings, Dubai—a city built on slave labor and under serious threat by the U.S.’ pointless war with Iran—sure looks nice under its lights.
While Ryan originally fit easily into the reactionary paradigm of the Reagan years, his mentality quickly drifted further and further away from a Republican-coded interventionist attitude, especially as the era of Donald Trump has centered cruelty and unprofessionalism, which stands in stark contrast to Clancy’s elitism, which manifested as a hatred for bureaucrats who prevented the people who really know what they’re doing from doing it.
The characters that really get things done in contemporary Hollywood cinema are superheroes. If one transposes their abilities onto some real-world equivalent, they would be special operators, the top-tier soldiers who can fight their way out of being outnumbered. Jack Ryan might be an analyst, but when the bullets start flying, he handles firearms as if he were a Navy SEAL. Stripped of any uniqueness, Jack Ryan has to be the analyst and the soldier, brains and brawn, a fantasy where every kind of violence the U.S. commits is done with good intentions and intellectual superiority.
It’s notable that this flattening of Ryan’s character is redundant, given that he already has a wetwork counterpart in John Clark. Clark isn’t a household name, though, and attempts to make him one (like 2021’s Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse) have failed. Jack Ryan may be the one thing still propping up Clancy’s name, which was once a culturally endemic brand in movies, books, and video games, one that denoted a certain seriousness to pulp-styled geopolitics. Now, they’ve become just another piece of conservative content, one increasingly overshadowed by the new TV empire being built by Without Remorse‘s co-screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, who is making even nastier conservative media for an even more volatile and cruel time.
While Without Remorse feels like it’s trying to keep the Clancy name relevant by being more like Sicario: Day Of The Soldado than any of the previous films, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War just tries to stamp the name onto a piece of marketing. This is partially because Clancy’s stock has fallen, and partially because those making movies—especially for a right-leaning crowd—now think that their audience doesn’t want anything more than that.
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