Excerpt:
Fans of Tom Clancy's bestselling thriller novels will unfortunately find little of Jack Ryan's moral clarity in the latest film inspired by the series. "Jack Ryan: Ghost War," one of the Top Five movies on Amazon Prime, follows CIA agent Jack Ryan as he tries to stop an MI6/CIA team created to fight Islamist terrorists. A pro-America version would make the team fighting the terrorists the heroes, but that isn't the case in "Ghost War." Instead, the villain appears to be the head of the post-9/11 antiterror task force, while the protagonists (led by Ryan) are people who want to shut the task force down.
Noticeably absent from the film is much, if any, evidence that the supposed bad guys acted inappropriately. As for Ryan's allies, they spend far more time arguing among themselves about what is right and wrong than trying to protect Americans from truly dangerous threats—whether from Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Chinese Communist Party or Islamist terrorists. This is a moral universe that Clancy wouldn't recognize.
As someone who grew up reading and loving Clancy's novels, I was mortified by the film's take on right and wrong. Clancy's books were beloved—and touted by Ronald Reagan—because of their clear moral framework in which the U.S. was the good guy and the Soviets and other nefarious global actors were the bad guys.