Jack Ryan has been portrayed in Clancy’s film adaptations of four of his novels by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck. In 2014, a reboot of the film series, titled Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, starred Chris Pine. The Jack Ryan film series have an unadjusted worldwide gross revenue of $788.4 million to date, making it the 57th highest-grossing film series. In addition, John Krasinski is the latest actor to play Ryan, this time in the upcoming Amazon Prime web television series of the same name, which will premiere in August 2018
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THE MOVIE:
Without diving into every single film in the Jack Ryan franchise we’ll update you here on the latest while recommending you check out the Jack Ryan original series on Amazon Video.
Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) is a well-educated American who after 9/11 he joins the military to serve his country. After a devastating attack on his crew, he is injured and forced to leave his duties. Meeting Cathy (Kiera Knightley), his therapist, Jack knows that’s the one for him. However, Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner) still sees him as a valuable asset and recruits Jack to the CIA as an undercover analyst. When Jack find links to a Russian magnate, Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh), he must go to Russia and find the truth about his discovery, but things are about to turn up a notch when things take a violent turn.
With Kenneth Branagh at the helm, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit brought a fresh new look to Tom Clancy’s classic character. After four previous actors have taken the role of Jack Ryan, including Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, Chris Pine take was better than expected. With that being said, the task to bring Jack Ryan back to the big screen was an uphill battle, losing Harrison Ford during the early script development, so with Pine a lot of hope was placed and indeed his performance was excellent. Far from the egotistical Captain Kirk, his cool and so out of his element act gave the audience an improbable hero.
But Pine’s performance couldn’t have shined without Kenneth Branagh’s excellent storytelling. Kenneth Branagh’s storytelling is some of the best in the business. Here Branagh brings a great balance in the story, there’s good character development, drama, action and suspense. There was always a good sense of pace and the story didn’t needlessly drag on. Branagh spent the first part of the film creating a backstory and giving the audience a glimpse of who was Jack Ryan. In essence Branagh set a perfect tone for Ryan that allowed us to really feel some attachment for him.
Shadow Recruit didn’t really perform as well as I had expected with a $50+ million Dollar domestic gross. Indeed the fact that many didn’t exactly know whom Jack Ryan is could be the real culprit. However, this new incarnation of the character hopefully brings more entries to the franchise since Shadow Recruit was very entertaining.
VIDEO QUALITY:
The Jack Ryan Collection comes in with HDR and Dolby Vision that definitely improve upon the Blu-ray discs. However it’s not by a far margin. If you are a fan of the films then this is a great set to get a bunch of quality films for. Otherwise you can hope your favs get stand alone releases on their own. Film grain where it was abundant in prior spots on the blu-rays is still there while the added depth of HDR does help the darks in which many of these films benefit from.
AUDIO QUALITY:
No Dolby Atmos here, but ports of the 5.1 Dolby TRUE HD tracks and 7.1 DTS HD Master for Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit. This release is more about the video presentation and it seems that by popular demand that The Hunt for the Red October is the favorite of the bunch. Hopefully one day we’ll get a stand alone Red October with Atmos.
SUPPLEMENTS:
The Jack Ryan 4k Collection comes with 10 discs. That of the 4k discs and blu-ray discs. All the supplements and special features from the prior blu-ray releases appear on these blu-ray discs.
Here’s a nice BTS Snippet of the new Jack Ryan Series.
