Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026)

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War arrives as the sixth cinematic outing for a character who has now been rebooted more times than a router, and it carries the weary professionalism of a franchise that knows precisely which buttons to press. Jack Ryan is pulled from his hedge fund desk, handed a cigarette pack, and sent globe-trotting after a rogue black-ops unit. Dubai, London, a bomb beneath Tower Bridge. The plot moves with the mechanical efficiency of a baggage carousel. Critics were unkind, and the film does little to argue with them, though it never pretends to be anything other than a Friday night diversion with good tailoring.

The ensemble is notably diverse, and this deserves acknowledgment. Wendell Pierce returns as Greer, now running the CIA. Betty Gabriel occupies the director's chair, and Sienna Miller's MI6 officer holds her own in every briefing room. Black actors sit in the highest seats of American intelligence, and women issue orders that men obey. The film presents all of this without a single speech about it. No character pauses to explain why representation matters. The demographics simply are, which is either a quiet sign of progress or a sign that the casting director did the work and the screenwriters stayed out of the way. Both readings are available.

What the film lacks, almost aggressively, is a thesis. There is no sermon about climate, no indictment of the hedge fund that briefly employs our hero, no arc in which a character learns to love their body or accept their neurodivergent colleague. The villains are rogue operatives, not capitalism. The conspiracy is bureaucratic, not systemic. Even the feminist reading is thin: women hold power, but the script never bothers to comment on the fact. This is a thriller content to be a thriller, and in an era of films that arrive with a reading list, there is something almost restful about one that simply wants to blow up a bridge.