Starring John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, Michael Kelly, Max Beesley, JJ Feild, Douglas Hodge, Betty Gabriel and Sienna Miller

Directed by Andrew Bernstein

Prime Video

In Dubai, an MI6 mission run by Nigel Cooke (Douglas Hodge) ends in bloodshed. In New York, a newly civilian and single Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) gets a visit from old friend James Greer (Wendell Pierce). He needs a package picked up from Dubai and sends Mike November (Michael Kelly) with Jack to help out. It’s an easy run, until Jack and Mike are arrested for murder by MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller). Years ago, Cooke and Greer trained war hero Liam Crown (Max Beeslet) to lead Starling, a no-rules Special Forces killteam dedicated to winning the War on Terror. They were stood down. Now, they’re standing back up and Greer is next in their sights.

The Amazon Prime Jack Ryan era has often been fun (DON’T MENTION THE VENEZUELA SEASON) and sometimes very good. Ghost War, its first foray into longer form, kind of falls between the two.

Krasinski, now co-writing with Aaron Rabin as well as starring, seems much more at home with this sort of story than he was in the early days and there’s some charming work here. The man’s funny, instinctively so, and the first half hour here is honestly charming. Krasinski’s laconic, not quite admitting how much fun he’s having Jack is a perfect match for Michael Kelly’s hyperactive puppy of a (mostly retired) arms dealer and seeing the two of them bounce off each other is huge fun. Plus we get a call back to the best joke from the original series (If I say ‘You ORDERED?!’ you’ll know what I mean).

Pierce, a man who I don’t think knows how to do bad work, is impressive here once again and the movie does its best work closing the loop on how he came to the CIA and giving some background to his choices. It’s also remarkably clear eyed about the terrible choices made by the US in the War on Terror and its best scene is just Krasinski and Pierce going at it over the ethics of their work. Jack as an alienated, permanently injured and disillusioned former soldier is a beat the series rarely touches on but coming from the endlessly chipper Krasinski it lands and lands very hard.

The other standout here is Miller. Emma Marlow is not so much the English Jack Ryan as a Slow Horse a few years off getting the call to report to Slough House. Gifted, spiky and funny she and Krasinski have instant chemistry that’s one-part old soldiers, one-part playmate. If, as seems likely, we get more of these movies I’d love Emma to be a regular member of the team.

All of this is fun to great, and the action impresses too. There’s a great, feverish chase and shootout through London and a neatly handled multi-level fight in Dubai to close the movie out. But there’s also this nagging sense of moral compromises being made to get a film about the horrors of moral compromise over the line. Abby Cornish’s Cathy Ryan is written out with the same offhand callousness she was last time and Hodge’s Nigel Cooke is a nervous spook directly out of central casting. Likewise, Max Beesley is always excellent but as Liam Crown is given nothing to do other than look competent and snarl. Worst of all, Betty Gabriel’s called back for this one only to have her character turned into punctuation.

These choices all pale in comparison to the movie’s attempt to have its cake and eat it about Dubai. Made with the assistance of the Dubai Media Council and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism the film’s bookend sequences are an extended advert for the emirate that plays like a slightly off brand Bond movie. Worst of all, the film goes out of its way to criticise the serial human rights abusing regime that it’s paying to work with. It’s a mystifying and deeply hypocritical choice, the film contorting into the same twisted moral pretzel that Greer and Cooke try so hard to escape. America’s hard fought moral compass deciding to look the other way as human rights violations mount up in the background.

Verdict: Ghost War is good, but it could, and should, have made better choices, much like its characters. Worth your time, but it’ll leave an unpleasant aftertaste. 6/10

Alasdair Stuart