SiftPop

by Jeff Alan, Contributing Writer

After a tense Season Two finale and a three-year hiatus, Jack Ryan returns. With John Krasinski of The Office and A Quiet Place fame back in the titular role, we have another globetrotting adventure of espionage. Krasinski is joined this season by returning cast members Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly, and new cast members Nina Hoss, Peter Guinness, James Cosmo, and Betty Gabriel.

Our story begins with Jack getting critical intelligence that a rogue Russian faction outside of the government with a decades-old plot is attempting to build and acquire a nuclear weapon, dubbed Sokol, to get Russia and NATO to be at war with each other and reform the Soviet Empire. Upon bringing this discovery to the CIA chief, Rome Elizabeth Wright (Gabriel), Jack is not approved for the mission. He proceeds anyway to extract Sokol from a sea freighter currently traveling on the Black Sea. Once he and his team are aboard the freighter, he finds out that the Russians do not have Sokol, but the man who can has knowledge of it and was placed in a shipping crate. After the extraction, and now on land, Jack and the man, Yuri (Michael Epp), are attacked by an unknown team and forced to escape to Athens, where the CIA has set up a safe house for them. 

At the same time, the plan to destabilize the Russian and NATO relations begins with the assassination of the Russian defense minister at a football match, and a patsy being set up, falsely accused, and shot on sight. Jack’s theory is that the rogue faction has a plan that ends with detonating Sokol, and the assassination of the Russian defense minister is the start. Once in Athens, Jack and Yuri are intercepted by the same rogue group, and Yuri is killed in the struggle. After another gunfight, Jack shoots and kills one of them to reveal he is a Greek operative. As he heads for the safe house, he realizes he is being set up as a fall guy for the failed operation. At the urge of Greer (Pierce), he has no choice but to run from his agency, and hopefully find more leads to help clear his name and get back in the CIA’s good graces.

With Ryan on the run, he must rely on any small bit of help he can get to evade capture, including Tony (Numan Acar) — who is returning from Season One for a brief appearance — and none other than Mike November (Kelly), who is now in the private sector and willing to help Jack the best way he can. Together, they come up with a plan to help bring this mysterious group of Russian terrorists to light and clear Jack’s name. In the meantime, Greer follows up with the president of the Czech Republic, Alena Kovac (Hoss), who thinks she may have valuable information about the Russian assassination and how she and her country are being used as pawns in in Russia’s plot to use the Sokol.

It’s nice to finally be brought back into the top-secret world of Jack Ryan’s life! Krasinski and all of the cast are firing on all cylinders, and Krasinski solidifies my opinion of him being the best Jack Ryan since Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October. The story is a little less than surprising, however, at least less surprising than they have been in past seasons. I tended to see a lot of the surprises throughout the season coming, but that doesn’t detract from how tense the situation is and how everything comes together. I think it’s less about how shocking the twists are, and more about how Jack solves the problem, which to me is more entertaining in this spy thriller series.

Overall, I think the new season of Jack Ryan is a thrilling new venture into the world of espionage, but it doesn’t hold that many surprises that make it priority viewing. The acting is perfectly fine and it is well shot, but this could be something you get to when you can, not something to binge immediately.

Score: 7/10

Jack Ryan is currently streaming on Prime Video

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