Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Season 2: Forgettable Actions in Venezuela

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Jack Ryan Season 2

I've greatly enjoyed the movies adapting Tom Clancy's novels. There was plenty of action and suspense, and you felt the character was always in a (wait for it) clear and present danger.

Now, I admittedly missed the first season of the JACK RYAN streaming series, and honestly I wasn't lost entering the second season without it. The storyline here was clearly a new beginning bringing back the titular character (played by John Krasinski) with James Greer (Wendell Pierce), and introducing Mike November (Michael Kelly). The setting is Venezuela, where the current corrupt leader, Nicolas Reyes (Jordi Mollà), is having his position challenged in the upcoming election by Gloria Bonalde (Cristina Umaña).

Beyond that, the series is a lot of internal operations, logistics, paperwork, rules and regulations, politics -- and, ultimately, unforgettable. Many stories, particularly novel adaptations, benefit from the long form storytelling that a series delivers. JACK RYAN is not one of them. The action is more intense when concentrated into a two-hour movie, where the minutiae of how everything has to happen is weeded out.

The long and the short of this season boils down to an election where the bad guy looks as though he is going to win because unsanctioned intervention by Americans in the process turns the population against them. And at every turn where Jack Ryan is told "No," he does what he wants anyway and finds someone in the bureaucracy to approve it, because he's Jack Ryan and he did a good thing once before.

Overall, I've never been more bored in a film with so many shootings and chase scenes.

Grade: 
2.0 / 5.0