|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
28
Mixed:
13
Negative:
1
|
Watch Now
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
TV Guide MagazineJan 3, 2023
Season 3 Review:
With allies including CIA officer James Greer (the sturdy Wendell Pierce) and ex-spy mercenary Mike November (a wry Michael Kelly) on hand to have his back in an impressive array of European countries, Jack rises above the internal politics to be at ground zero. [2 - 15 Jan 2023, p.7]
Read full review
Aug 27, 2018
Season 1 Review:
All of the performances in Jack Ryan transform what would be a rather typical military-hero-hunts-nefarious-brown-terrorists yarn into a series that leaves you curious about the fates of a number of unrelated people, including those related to the antagonists. ... It’s a bingeworthy action series led by a superhuman office worker. Need some people to root for? Krasinski, Pierce and Jack Ryan have you covered.
Read full review
Aug 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The sequences in the field often falter when depicting action: The explosions and combat, despite the show’s big budget, can come off confusing and underwhelming. But Ryan, feeling his way through situations he never encountered behind the desk, provides a worthy anchor for our attention. Best of all, the show knows when to get the character out of the way and concentrate on telling other stories.
Read full review
Dec 21, 2022
Season 3 Review:
If nothing else, the show is a testament to the fact that Krasinski is a bona fide action movie star, an impressive evolution from his days wooing the receptionist on The Office. Jack Ryan has been the perfect vehicle to showcase just that, but that ride might be starting to run out of gas as it nears the finish line.
Read full review
IndieWireAug 21, 2018
Season 1 Review:
It’s the little things that separate the solid spy stories from the addictive ones, and “Jack Ryan” has momentum while still lacking an x-factor. For all the other Jack Ryan entries, the missing piece was in the man himself. Jack Ryan is an everyman type, but he’s not any man. Here, he could be, and that’s the slight.
Read full review
Aug 31, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Ryan may be the shallowest figure here, an assemblage of reactions and attitudes more than a person we get to know--or seem to get to know, which is all the same in television. His early-episodes earnestness is appealing. ... He is forced to spend much of the middle episodes in a kind of balled-up funk as Ryan stews indignantly over the moral compromises he encounters "in the field." ... It gives all the best moments away to Pierce, who is as easily believable, and believably easy, as an old agency pro as he's been in every other part he's ever played. Still, the star handles the action well, when it comes.
Read full review
Aug 30, 2018
Season 1 Review:
A solid spy thriller, with a strong narrative tug and appealing performers (including Wendell Pierce as Ryan’s mentor, James Greer, and Abbie Cornish as his girlfriend, Cathy Mueller), that doesn’t rise to the game-changing heights the new entertainment regime at Amazon might have wanted.
Read full review
Aug 29, 2018
Season 1 Review:
[John Krasinksi’s] affable modesty helps to sell Ryan’s grace-under-pressure heroics, as when his game face collapses into jitters after he coolly kills a terrorist. Elsewhere, he seems incongruously cuddly. ... The series proceeds with the squareness and solidity of a CBS procedural, but one graced with the luxuries of an HBO budget.
Read full review
Aug 28, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Filmic in its look and style – the series screams “big budget” – “Jack Ryan” has its exciting moments, and even when there are not explosions on screen, the presence of the always-likeable Mr. Krasinski easily pulls viewers through to the next exciting action set piece.
Read full review
Aug 24, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The interplay between Krasinski and Pierce brightens up that journey through well-worn territory, and the well-executed international intrigue also means it’s far from a slog. But Jack Ryan would do well to remember a certain proverb to prevent the show from being all work and no play for its otherwise strong lead.
Read full review
Aug 28, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Despite paying cursory service to humanizing its principal characters, Jack Ryan is mostly interested in a battle between broad notions of good and evil. It thrives on the tension of Jack's chess match with bin Suleiman, reducing an entire nation's efforts to combat terror to a personal beef between two archetypes.
Read full review
Aug 31, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Ryan’s part of the story is a breeze: He’s the good soldier, here to save the day. Sometimes he’ll face some sort of moral dilemma, but it’s never too difficult to guess what the outcome will be. The rest of the series is much thornier, and all the more real for it.
Read full review
Nov 7, 2019
Season 2 Review:
The second season still lands with more dissonance because of the very aspect that should make the character feel more relevant – that is, its proximity to reality. ... The problem may be that Krasinski’s Jack Ryan is closely informed by other actor’s interpretations of the character, namely Harrison Ford’s. Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” still clings to an outdated action movie ethos that relies on a general ignorance about the way the world actually is versus a version of how it ought to be when Michael Bay was redefining action movie bombast.
Read full review
Aug 30, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The show gestures at ambiguity, and at the edges of its map, the borders between righteousness and zealotry get thinner and less clear. In the center, though, at the axis around which everything spins, the math is simpler. Jack Ryan: good. Terrorists: bad. If Jack Ryan spent more time shading in Ryan’s personal world, there might be more chance for the character to feel three-dimensional.
Read full review
Aug 30, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Jack Ryan excels at pyrotechnics. Walls, trucks and people explode in spectacular arrays of destruction. Its fight choreography gets muddy, especially when Jack is tussling with some terrorist. ... The most charitable thing that can be said about Krasinski’s performance here is that he looks deeply, deeply tired.
Read full review
Aug 29, 2018ColliderNov 1, 2019
Season 2 Review:
If Season 1 wasn’t your bag, there are no significant changes to the series’ DNA here to suddenly turn you around on the series. And while there’s enough good in Jack Ryan Season 2 to keep it from being a complete waste, I do hope the already-ordered third season takes a beat to fine-tune a few key aspects of the show.
Read full review
ColliderAug 20, 2018
Season 1 Review:
It’s just odd to realize mid-way through that a show featuring this many explosions and gratuitous, all-too-familiar terrorist attacks can also be this boring. ... Krasinski lends an un-earned charisma to the character through sheer presence alone, but the nature of the character itself forces him into the background of most situations looking like he’d much, much rather be playing Minesweeper.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score