Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is a 2026 action thriller directed by Andrew Bernstein, written by Aaron Rabin and John Krasinski from a story by Noah Oppenheim and Krasinski, and released on Prime Video on 20 May. It runs 106 minutes and stars Krasinski as Jack Ryan, with Wendell Pierce as James Greer, Michael Kelly as Mike November and Sienna Miller as MI6 officer Emma Marlow.

I want to open with something I got wrong, because it reframes my own reaction to the film.

I finished this and thought, at least I dodged the television series. Then I discovered that this film is a direct continuation of that series. It shares the same continuity, the same Jack, the same Greer and the same November, and it picks up after four seasons of Prime Video television. So I have, entirely by accident, watched the finale of a show I have never seen a single episode of.

Which may account for some of what I felt, because the film clearly assumes a level of investment in these relationships that I simply do not have. Whether four seasons of groundwork would have rescued it is a question I genuinely cannot answer, and now never will.

Because this was just not a fun watch. It did not do anything new, fun or exciting. It exists, it moves from place to place, and then it finishes.

It was shot well, and I am not going to take that away from it. It was filmed on location in London and it looks expensive and competent throughout. But that is honestly all I can give it. Everything else is lifted from better and more successful spy films, assembled without any apparent interest in why those films worked.

And I am firmly in the majority on this. The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus is close to a word-for-word version of my own reaction, stating that the film ploughs through a routine globe-trotting plot with mechanical efficiency but little else, and that it reduces Krasinski’s once-compelling CIA operative to a personality-free action cipher. That last phrase in particular is doing a lot of work and doing it accurately.

Another reviewer wrote that despite an abundance of action, the film never comes to life, instead playing like a too-conventional spy yarn in which Ryan reluctantly deals, as usual, with the ethical conundrums of his shadowy world.

But my favourite piece of criticism is aimed squarely at the type of film I normally defend on this site. One reviewer described Ghost War as a sad state of affairs for the world’s dads, and dads at heart, who deserve to see airport-novel espionage brought to less chintzy life. That is funny, and it is also exactly the complaint. There is nothing wrong with a competent, unfussy spy thriller for grown-ups. This simply is not a good one.