- Title: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan – Pilot
- wiki: link
In Amazon’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, John Krasinski becomes the latest actor to step into the shoes of Tom Clancy’s most famous character. The show’s pilot episode introduces us to CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Krasinski) who follows several overseas bank transfers back to who he believes to be a terrorist on the rise known as Suleiman. The show’s first episode takes awhile to get going spending too much time in Ryan’s office and featuring the character getting off on the wrong foot with his new boss (Wendell Pierce) who, when Ryan’s hunch pays off, decides to take him into the field to help question a pair of suspects who they believe may be tied to the terrorist network.
The episode bends over backwards to remind us that Jack is a good man in a dirty business. Although he’s willing to play on the affections of a co-worker with an obvious crush for his own selfish purposes, it’s for a good cause (and he won’t even go so far to offer a stock tip to his ex-boss). “Pilot” also features a far-too-obvious Trojan Horse feint by the terrorists to retrieve two men (one of whom turns out to be the terrorist leader Jack has been hunting). The sequences in the desert, particularly during the extended gun battle, are certainly cinematic, although it takes quite awhile to get there. Once in the field, Krasinski’s version of Ryan becomes far more likable while the show teases, rather than reveals, the past that fans of the character know very well by now. While I prefer either Pine or Ford’s previous take on the character, this Ryan has a chance to grow on me… if the story can keep my interest long enough.
