Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Season 3 (2022, Exec. Producer Carlton Cuse):
When it comes to that particularly American genre of military/spec-ops adventure, Amazon has cornered the market. Jack Reacher, Without Remorse, The Terminal List, Jack Ryan: call them thrillers for red-meat eaters. To watch these shows is to surrender to the lure of simplicity, where every locale is labeled onscreen for easy reference, every bad guy deserves what’s coming to him, every plot complication is resolved via gunfire, and no evildoers or despotic government can withstand the Uncle Sam-approved application of brute force, righteousness and high tech.
Of the above shows, the globe-trotting Jack Ryan has always been the most expansive, touching on topics of the moment — PTSD, non-state terrorism, drones, arms smuggling, political skullduggery — while insisting on the old-fashioned sincerity and valor of its hero (John Krasinski). While Ryan season 1 more or less updated the character for the age of Islamic extremism, season 2 was a sloppy ride into Venezuelan civil war and Narcos-lite back-stabbing that failed to rise above banana republic stereotypes. Now comes season 3, and a story right in Jack Ryan creator Tom Clancy’s wheelhouse: a conspiracy intended to stoke Russian-U.S. tensions and ignite nuclear conflict. Yes, we’re back to Cold War melodrama, and as fate and current events would have it, what once was old is now in vogue again.
Those who’ve seen the previous two seasons of Jack Ryan will know the drill: Ryan catches wind of the baddies’ plans, Ryan has a hell of a time convincing his by-the-book superiors that he’s right, Ryan ultimately takes on the threat himself with clenched-jaw aplomb, aided by his usual buddies: Greer (Wendell Pierce), his tetchy sometime-boss, and Mike November (Michael Kelly), a former CIA station chief who’s now a private contractor. Throw in the usual chewy terminology (“Use a four-man team, SOG, sheep-dipped, recon only”), rogue Russian hardliners carrying out a coup in Moscow, a secret nuke invisible to radar, and talk of Russian troops massing in Ukraine, and you have a story that’s just close enough to real life to be uncomfortable, while throwing in just enough goofiness to reassure us that there’s no way this stuff would ever actually happen.
Like Clancy’s books, Jack Ryan is at its best when it doesn’t pause to consider the inner life of its characters. Clancy knew his stuff when it came to weaponry and military tactics; when it came to presenting actual recognizable humans, he was utterly hopeless. (Thus you have eye-rolling moments like Jack buddying up with the Prince of Wales in Patriot Games and giving him advice on how to be a real man and a better husband.) That same weakness plagued the first two seasons of the show, which wasted valuable time trying to create the illusion of depth: perfunctory love interests for Jack, much time spent with minor characters (a frazzled drone operator, a former sailor drafted into a spec-ops mission) that added up to nearly nothing. Save for some fleeting bits of humor, season 3 all but dispenses with character entirely. The result is Jack Ryan in undiluted form, where the chase is all, and the dialogue is either plot-driven or hard-boiled half-quips. (“Remember that line I was telling you about? You just crossed it.”)
The first episode is a doozy as it ping-pongs from Moscow to Prague, Rome and the Mediterranean, with incidents galore: a shocking assassination, a tense spec-ops rescue mission, double-crosses and firefights. It concludes with Jack on “Red Notice,” a fugitive from his own people, disappearing into the crowd a la Jason Bourne. The subsequent seven episodes can’t live up to that slam-bang set-up, but they do offer more calibrated plotting than previous seasons. With all the “Russia House” references, secret spy meetings, and flashbacks to Soviet betrayals in 1969, the tone hews closer to a John le Carré thriller, which suits executive producers Krasinski and Carlton Cuse just fine; they seem more at home in eastern Europe and Russia than they were in season 2’s Venezuelan jungles. It also helps to have decent baddies on hand, and as the masterminds behind the conspiracy, Alexej Manvelov and Peter Guinness are suitably hissable, while a scowling James Cosmo steals the show as a Russian master spy who may (or may not) be on the side of the angels.
Of course, this is a Jack Ryan show, so one must expect the usual amount of hokum and absurdity. In his previous incarnations, Jack was a crack analyst and reluctant field agent; now he’s the tip of the spear, leading charges into the fray and plugging bad guys left and right when he’s not winning people to his cause with his Boy Scout sincerity. In this funhouse version of the world, might actually does make right, the President of Russia is a decent fellow, an officious CIA chieftain (Betty Gabriel) can come through in the clutch and surmount bureaucratic incompetence, the world’s problems can be solved with a tape of a secretly recorded conversation, and even the president of the Czech Republic (Nina Hoss) gets in on the fun, as she coldly stares down a traitor as he bleeds out in front of her. Speaking of fun, you won’t find much of it in Krasinski’s performance; self-effacing as ever, his Ryan is central to the story yet strangely inconsequential as a character. But as always, he holds his own, rattling off strategic terms and blasting away with his assault rifle with equal proficiency. Pierce and Kelly fare better; their deadpan one-liners remind us that while Jack might embody red-white-and-blue values, it’s more fun to be a wiseass.
Like its lead character, Jack Ryan is stoic, B-grade entertainment. Its action set-pieces are exciting in theory but rote in execution, and it models itself on other spy thrillers—Bourne, Mission: Impossible, even the Jack Ryan movies—without quite having a distinct personality of its own. But if a sense of “been there, done that” creeps in while Jack runs, drives and shoots away, it’s all part of the deal. Jack Ryan is about reliability, down to every money shot of explosive ordinance and fetishistic discussion of small-war doctrine. As Krasinski and the late Tom Clancy (whose name hovers in the credits like a phantom) know, giving the people what they want is always a solid choice, even if what they want ends up being more of the same. ■
