Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan

Jack Ryan goes above and beyond the pro forma basics of getting the job done. This is a thrilling and energetic enterprise replete with well-drawn characters and propulsive action. Binge-watchers, start your engines.

It’s a smart show, for all its huffing and puffing. Mr. Krasinski might even grow on you.

Expertly plotted by creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is all the more impactful for its restraint and scope, offering excellent character-based drama that’s concerned with much more than just its namesake.

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.

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.

Solid, engaging, propulsive--and a little bit too familiar.

In the end, the makers of Jack Ryan accomplish two important things: creating a TV Jack Ryan who feels like Jack Ryan, and giving audiences good reason to care about the next episode.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

It’s a show that knows exactly what it wants to be and is mostly quite successful at it.

The Jack Ryan name will cut through the clutter and polished production values and the solid Krasinski should help viewers choose this Oreo, even if it's only sometimes appreciably better than the store-brand sandwich cookie.

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.

An intriguing, yet exasperating, reboot. [17/24 Aug 2018, p.83]