The unfortunate Bourne-ification of Jack Ryan

How a lateral career move at the CIA undermines the character, if you think about it way too hard.

There is a central, key conceit to the character of Jack Ryan as written by Tom Clancy and featured in every Jack Ryan adaptation up til now: he’s not supposed to be here.

By “here,” I mean wherever people are shooting guns and blowing things up. But the most recent season of the eponymous show on Amazon ditched this conceit, and the character is weaker for it.

Ryan has always been an analyst at the CIA. For the few who may be unfamiliar, the Agency was for a long time more or less split down the middle, between the operational side and the analytical side — even if it’s tried its best to interweave the two in the past couple decades. This is an oversimplification, of course, and there are now several directorates, but it’s good enough for this discussion.

It’s the operational people, the case officers under diplomatic cover, the officers under less official cover and the paramilitary staff and contractors, who are the ones out in the field where a majority of the “action” takes place that fictional accounts then exaggerate and dramatize. Analysts may be deployed abroad — see my reports about analyst Sarah Carlson’s adventures in Libya for an example — but the job is popularly known as a desk job.

Since Ryan has always been an analyst — and a huge nerd, canonically — it fell on Clancy and later screenwriters to consistently invent reasons he’s been dragged into the center of the action, often against his will. Usually it’s because of his particular expertise in whatever emergency is happening, sometimes it’s because the bad guys are personally going after him for some reason, or he’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In fact, one of my favorite recurring scenes in the books and movies is one in which Ryan argues why he absolutely should not be sent wherever his bosses are sending him. A great distillation comes in an exchange from 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears” between Ryan, played by Ben Affleck, and CIA operations officer John Clark, played by Liev Schreiber, as they’re discussing sneaking into some remote Eastern European facility:

Ryan: I don’t go on the, you know, missions.

Clark: Relax, 007, it’s not a mission. It’s just a recce.

Ryan: Well, okay, fine, whatever you call it, I’m not… I don’t do that. I just write reports!

Clark: Okay, so write a report about it. Suit up.

So of course Ryan goes and things get more interesting than everyone bargained for and Ryan is forced to do some action star-flavored stuff.

That is an essential part, if not the essential part, of his character.

He may be a former Marine, which gives Clancy and other writers some latitude for Ryan to be able to handle himself, but at the heart of things he’s a normal guy thrust into an extraordinary situation who imperfectly rises to the occasion. That’s a built-in character arc that audiences can get behind (repeatedly, considering how many Jack Ryan stories are out there).

The first two seasons of Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” stuck with this formula, and there was a scene in the pilot in which John Krasinski’s Ryan is flabbergasted that he’s being asked to personally go in the field. The formula repeats with Ryan’s canonical boss, James Greer (who’s also been operationalized in this show):

Ryan: I can’t go to Yemen. I’m an analyst. I don’t interrogate people. I write reports!

Greer: Well, that’s going to make a doozy. Get on the f***ing plane.

But by Season 3, it appears the writers threw up their hands. When I started watching, I was annoyed at just how in-the-field Ryan appeared to be with little explanation, in some foreign capital clandestinely meeting with an asset from the jump. Then, just a little ways through that first episode, Greer mentions offhandedly that it makes him happy how well Ryan has taken the transition to being a case officer. Sacrilege.

I get it. It always required some tortured writing to give Ryan a reason to be in the center of the action when he really shouldn’t be. You can only do that for so long. It stands to reason that’s why Clark, a former Navy SEAL and CIA fixer, became the star of some Tom Clancy novels — he’s naturally in dangerous situations all the time; he’s been doing exactly that his whole career. (Michael B. Jordan has played Clark in 2021’s “Without Remorse” and is reported to be in talks to reprise the role in a “Rainbow Six” movie.)

Turning Ryan into Clark, however, is just making him a generic action star, ala Jason Bourne. If he’s been trained for this, if he’s initiating the action, then he’s no longer a natural underdog. Audiences should no longer be fearful he’s in over his head or light years out of his comfort zone, reacting as best he can with the extremely limited skill set that he has when disaster strikes. The scene of Harrison Ford’s Ryan struggling, fumbling to survive an ambush in Colombia in “Clear and Present Danger” comes to mind.

That’s not to say that good action cannot be wrought out of this new Ryan. I’m a huge fan of the Bourne films (and the very different novels before them), and I was generally a fan of Season 3 of “Jack Ryan”. But it’s a different experience.

It’s the difference between Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”, in which an Everyman cop is up against impossible odds in the form of a heavily armed squad of bad guys, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Commando”, in which you’re really just watching to see exactly how a badass professional is going to come out on top in the coolest way possible. Similarly, the fun of the Bourne movies is seeing how Matt Damon’s amnesiac already knows how to outwit every enemy he comes across thanks to years of specific training — even if he can’t remember until it’s already happening.

But that’s not Jack Ryan. Give me back my Ryan who is terrified of helicopters, who wants nothing more than to be left to do his work in a cubicle if only the ops guys would listen to him, who has tense computer duels with a skeezy bureaucrats, who, in his first nerdiest movie incarnation by Alec Baldwin, gets the most excited by divining the meaning of odd shapes on the outside of a Russian submarine.

The real shame is I don’t think it would be that tortured to find ways of keeping Ryan, the analyst, in the center of the action. In real life the Agency has been working hard to tear down the wall between analysis and operations, and as Carlson’s story shows, forward-deployed analyts can find themselves in dramatic, life-or-death stakes situations.

She wrote a report about it!

P.S. The other great recurring scene in just about every Ryan adaptation is when he can’t help but speak out out of place in a high-powered meeting about a theory of his that no one believes but of course turns out to be right. Morgan Freeman’s Bill Cabot, a Greer stand-in, said it best, “When I asked for your advice, I didn’t mean you should actually speak.”