Jack Ryan: John Krasinski's character is a 'Jack of all trades and master of every single one of them'

Toby Earle31 August 2018

Alec Baldwin. Harrison Ford. Ben Affleck. Chris Pine. John Krasinski. What all these handsome gents share – apart from a love of re-enacting the Viking raid of Lindisfarne – is inhabiting the humble but heroic shoulders of Jack Ryan, who bruises stars and stripes.

Since 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, released the year after the Berlin Wall fell, Jack Ryan has been a profitable and enduring enough box office draw, although Ryan spent a dozen years in development captivity between The Sum of All Fears (2002) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014).

As someone must have said somewhere before reactivating the resting agent for a new Amazon series, "Third reboot’s the charm!" They probably gave a thumbs up, too.

So what flavour of Jack Ryan is Krasinski? Baldwin’s bookish, academic Ryan? Ford’s adaptable and resourceful Ryan? The Afflecky Ryan? Or the younger, Pine-fresh Ryan? Krasinski’s Ryan is, overwhelmingly, a good guy. Not as in "The Good Guy™", but a good, super good guy, his qualities all but listed in the first 16 minutes of the opening episode; he cycles to work, he’s passionate, he has a takeaway and a beer in front of a gameshow to unwind (while nailing every obscure question), and, at night, he’s haunted by the time he served in the military. You monster, how can you not love this man? He’s just like us.

Jack Ryan - in pictures

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Only, no, he really is not. He’s a Jack of all trades and master of every single one of them. Ryan is brilliant, piecing together complex money trails, holding his own in mortal combat, and even cracking a code it would take several series worth of Only Connect contestants to decipher. Though, to be fair, he does it without the gaze of Victoria Coren-Mitchell dragging across his brain stem.

Ryan is an example of American exceptionalism, a figure capable of coping with whatever is demanded of him while exhibiting a previously unknown preternatural talent for solving those problems. But he’s just like us, a facet we’re reminded of when a colleague approaches him for advice on who to play on her baseball fantasy league team, a scene which has sirens whooping in the background to draw your attention to how gosh-darn-normal he is. ‘Who is America?’, asks Sacha Baron Cohen; sir, it’s this boy scout.

To wear such luminescent talent with ease is a challenge, one which Krasinski is canny enough to swerve. This incarnation of Jack Ryan is an outline, as odourless as a five-star hotel’s bathroom after a deep clean, Krasinski underserved by a script which has the pep of a grudging Boxing Day jog. This reboot of Ryan sets him against a mysterious figure in Yemen named Suleiman (Ali Suliman), who he suspects of plotting a terrorist attack; he is at least afforded a slim backstory to explain his anger, although his wife Hanin (Dina Shihabi) is the more interesting and conflicted character. Espionage fans on the hunt for studied psychological dives, do move along, there’s nothing to see here.

For the moment, Jack Ryan doesn’t pose a clear and present danger to the spy genre. Fourth reboot’s the charm?

Jack Ryan debuts on Amazon Prime today

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