When it comes to escapist entertainment, political action thrillers are in a gloriously batshit crazy class all of their very own.
Employing only the loosest of adherence to the real world, although ostensibly a stalwart reflection of it, these gripping stories of life behind the veneer of political and diplomatic respectability thrill to the idea that the world we live in is all shadows, skullduggery and energisingly intense edge-of-the-action where the world is in a peril so grave it may yet not survive it.
Of course, we know it will, and that’s half the fun, knowing that the hero will triumph against the bad guys no matter what they throw at him or her (though testosterone still rules the espionage roost much of the time) and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that people of the calbre of the hero are there, and have our backs firmly in sight.
One such hero is Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, a character who emerged in a seemingly endless series of books known as the Ryanverse, and who has gone to star in a series of adaptations starring five actors, the latest of whom is John Krasinski, who also serves as executive producer in the latest season of a show, the fourth and final season of which debut sometime in 2023.
While anchored in a real world of political machinations, diplomatic sleight-of-hands and espionage crosses and double-crosses, Jack Ryan’s chief claim to entertaining fame is that it delivers up a hero who might be in real trouble from time to time, but who always manages to come out on top, saving the day and earning the gratitude of a grateful world (well, the ones allowed to know about what he’s done, anyway) in the process.
In season three of the series, which premiered 21 December just before peak Christmas viewing time, Jack Ryan takes on what is a routine job in his highly-charged world which is to stop a rogue group of Russians from bringing back the glory days of the Soviet Union and bringing back a reputedly small and timid monster that once geopolitically scared the world to its once terrifying glory.
While Jack is initially successful, the threat posed by these ultra-nationalist true believers is bigger, deadlier and more expansive that anyone first realises, and so begins a race against an atomic clock which is all set to start a great, big, messy war between the USA and revived-by-forced Russia.
It’s impossible to give away too much of the plot without venturing deep into spoiler territory, which literally occupies the territories of countries like Greece, Russia and the Czech Republic at one point or another – while the show doesn’t cover the globe in the same way as say the Bond or Bourne franchises, it skips merrily and without a hint of passport control across national boundaries – but suffice to say that Jack Ryan builds an ever more complex weave of intrigue and derring-do in its quest to save the world from those who wish to imperil it for their own ends.
The appeal of a show like Jack Ryan is that it takes unpredictable political scenarios over which we have no control and a chaotically terrifying world which pays no heed to our need for safety and security, and gives them a solid sense of justice served and the neat endings tied up.
We walk away with a satisfying feeling that while ageing superpowers may invade neighbours with impunity – interestingly in this season, Russia moves its troops through Ukraine to the Slovakian border with little to no trouble, something which has manifestly not happened in the real world, thankfully – and those with a geopolitical axe to grind may move political and diplomatic chess pieces around with no ill effect (well, until Jack gets to them anyway), that the Right Thing will be done in the end.
In this happily logical world, people such as Czech President Alena Kovac (Nina Hoss) listen to reason at just the right moment to arguments conveyed by the likes of Ryan’s onetime boss James Greer (Wendell Pierce), super ambitious CIA operative Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel) and even ageing Russian spy master Luka Goncharov (James Cosmo), their belated actions resulting in just the right turn of events taking place just in the nick of time to prevent certain disaster.
While it’s all gloriously over the top with the US and Russian presidents apparently unable to pick up the phone to each other, and Jack able to waltz around, even when he’s being hunted by an array of people out to get him and stop his campaign to halt the baddies in their path, a show like Jack Ryan works because it suspends belief to such an extent that you simply acquiesce and go along with it.
That willingess to kick any consideration for geopolitical realities to the kerb is all through season three with sane and rational deliberations cast wilfully aside in pursuit of a need to make the action as thrillingly intense as humanly possible.
While you may baulk at the Czech President dropping protocol to sneak through the Kremlin tunnels for a furtive meeting with her Russian counterpart (who is no Putin and one of the sane souls who averts the world going down the nuclear drain) or Jack being able to fall out of helicopters or be bashed on trains without any apparent deleterious effect (beyond the need for a bandaid or two), you will fall fully and completely into the idea that the worst things the political world can throw at us can be fixed, that political excess and ultra-nationalist planning can come to nought, and that events conspired to end the world can be thwarted by one man with a mind, heart and willingness to do what needs to be done, repercussions be damned.
While it’s palpably true that Jack Ryan is not exactly out-of-the-box original and joins a long line of super successful espionage heroes defying the odds, he is excitingly and enticingly executed, particulary by Krasinski, with such a beguiling mix of human vulnerability and yet earnestly brash certainty, that you welcome him into your viewing arms as he proves, in defiance of a real world which reluctantly fights back only if there is political benefit to be had, that the bad guys will come to nothing, that nefarious plots can be foiled and that our broken, fallen, irredeembaly damaged world can be saved and we can breathe that sense of relief we have desperate to expel for much of our geopolitically-engendered, anxiety-plagued life.