Amazon’s ‘Jack Ryan’: Critics lukewarm, but audiences are loving it

John Krasinski in “Tom Clancy’s Jack
Ryan.”
Amazon

• Critics have been lukewarm on the new Amazon series
  “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” but audiences are into
  it. 
• The series premiered on Amazon Prime last Friday, and
  it currently has a 72% critic rating on Rotten
  Tomatoes. 

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Amazon’s latest series, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” received mixed
reviews from TV critics ahead of its premiere, but audiences have
greeted it with a warmer reception after its debut last
Friday. 

John Krasinski (“A Quiet Place”) stars as Ryan, an anti-terrorist
CIA operative, in the first TV series take on a character that
originated in a series of novels by Tom Clancy. The character has
also appeared in five previous film adaptations, beginning with
1984’s “The Hunt for Red October.”

Amazon has
described the series as tracking Ryan’s efforts
in “a deadly game of cat and mouse throughout Europe
and the Middle East, with a rising terrorist figurehead preparing
for a massive attack against the US and her allies.”

The show currently has a 72% “fresh”
rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but it stands
at a 90% audience rating on the site.

Critics have ranged from positive to negative on the series, with
reviewers on both sides of the spectrum calling Krasinski’s Ryan
a bland character. 

“Amazon’s ‘Jack Ryan’ succeeds by spinning a suspenseful,
big-budget adventure about terrorism around the blandest action
hero in the business,” NPR’s Eric Duggan
wrote in a review.

“It’s hardly a good thing when you realize a series could
be improved if only the producers edited out the star,” Mark A.
Perigard
wrote for the Boston Herald. 

But fans of the series have reacted to it more positively than
critics. 66% of Amazon users have given it a 5-star rating on the
show’s
Prime page, with the average rating being 4.1 stars. 

“This isn’t the Jack Ryan of the novels, nor the Jack Ryan
of the films. It’s a fresh, relevant take on the character set
against the backdrop of terrorism in our world today,” Amazon
user SpyMagician wrote in a 5-star
review. “The plot is intricate and the
antagonist is extremely well fleshed out. Not at all a cookie
cutter movie terrorist, but a character with depth that makes his
actions all the more terrifying.”

Watch the series on
Amazon Prime.