Jack Ryan: War and the Ghost Movie (review)
John Krasinski reprises the role of Jack Ryan in a feature film which directly extends the Prime Video series. An ultra-marked extension, which seamlessly recycles the codes of the contemporary spy thriller.
John Krasinski returns to the CIA.
In the wake of the series broadcast between 2018 and 2023 on Prime Video, the former star of The Office puts his Jack Ryan costume back on for a feature film which directly continues the events of the last episode. Jack Ryan: Phantom War, put online today on the platform, is, in this sense, less the sixth film in the franchise adapted from Tom Clancy (and debuted in the cinema by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October in 1990) than the epilogue of a story told in the three previous seasons. A big-budget concluding TV movie in short, which will have difficulty speaking to those who have not watched the series.
Especially since as a spy thriller, the film itself gives the impression of recycling a formula that has already been widely exploited. We are told about a lost USB key with crucial information, a list of clandestine agents who have turned their backs, a collaboration between the CIA and MI6 that went wrong… Jack Ryan must team up with a British spy personally involved (Sienna Miller) and the affair will quickly escalate to the highest levels of Anglo-American intelligence. So many recycled issues. The scenario is so generic that it almost becomes fascinating. Nothing is out of the box. Especially not. We sometimes have the impression of specifications executed without personality, as if an AI had been asked to write the most standardized Mission: Impossible possible, by compressing all the recipes of the contemporary spy thriller into a watered-down version (the villain is undoubtedly the blandest antagonist seen in a while). Result: a imitation M:I sponsored by Dubai, which aligns the strings of the genre wrung out in the 21st century. A sort of automatic synthesis deprived of any roughness.
The staging, of undeniable effectiveness, allows the film not to sink completely, and wisely accompanies this flat story, without ever trying to shake it up either. Everything is correct, sometimes even fluid, but nothing really takes off, as if the film stubbornly refused to take the slightest narrative or formal risk. Even if it means passing like a shadow on our screen…
In this ultra-formatted framework, this Jack Ryan 2026 therefore unfolds predictable mechanics, designed not to disturb streaming subscribers. A spy entertainment without vision, without taking risks, which moves on rails. Only John Krasinski still manages to maintain a minimum of interest, without succeeding in saving the world from this lackluster continuation, which functions more as an auxiliary product than as a real film.
Jack Ryan: Phantom War, watch on Prime Video, from May 20, 2026.
