Jack Ryan: Ghost War — Insubstantial

Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for violence and profoanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang 

This seems to be the week for popular streaming shows to spawn feature-length films.

 

I hope the Mandalorian and Grogu are treated with more respect.

 

When a tightly planned operation goes horribly wrong, CIA Deputy Director Greer
(Wendell Pierce, center) must be restrained by MI6 operative Emma Marlow
(Sienna Miller) and veteran CIA agent Jack Ryan (John Krasinski).

Sadly, John Krasinski’s newest Jack Ryan adventure feels like a six-part serial clumsily slashed down to a 105-minute film. Back in the day, I’d have called this a Readers Digest Condensed Movie.

(On a trivial note, the unwisely chosen title evokes memories of 2011’s vastly superior Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.)

 

Director Andrew Bernstein and editor Jason Ballantine’s hyperkinetic pacing amplifies the overall sense of racing to be done with this puppy, a feeling that’s particularly true during the expository, banter-laden initial conversation between “retired” CIA agent Ryan (Krasinski) and CIA Deputy Director James Greer (Wendell Pierce).

 

Honestly, it feels like their chat is being timed by a stopwatch.

 

Three years have passed since the events in Ryan’s fourth-season streaming show, which concluded when he left the CIA for a vaguely defined “civilian job in hedge funds.” His relationship with Dr. Cathy Mueller (Abbie Cornish) is ancient history, and he greets each day jogging along the streets of New York City.

 

Meanwhile, in Dubai, two MI6 agents scramble to crack a computer bank in the upper floor of an unfinished DAMAC tower building. Their goal, under the remote guidance of Nigel Cooke (Douglas Hedge), is to extract evidence of off-books black-ops activity thought to have been shuttered 20 years earlier.

 

Alas, ruthless thugs sent by Liam Crown (Max Beesley) kill them before the information is fully downloaded.

 

(And what, pray tell, is such a sophisticated, unguarded computer bank doing in an otherwise dusty and littered construction site? Well might you ask...)

 

Back in the States, Greer begs a favor of Ryan: Go to Dubai, liaise with Cooke, and collect some intel he’s apparently desperate to share. Ryan reluctantly agrees, and travels with a longtime friend: former CIA colleague-turned-private contractor Mike November (Michael Kelly), quick with a quip, and capable in a pinch.

 

Alas, this “simple” assignment goes south. Cooke is killed, Ryan winds up with nothing but a cigarette pack — and a warning that Greer is “in trouble” — after which he and November are taken into custody by MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller). She’s furious over the way these two Americans have interfered with her surveillance of the situation.

 

G20: An engaging guilty pleasure

G20 (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless violence

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Viola Davis isn’t the first Best Actress Oscar winner to turn into a kick-ass action hero — she was preceded by Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren and Jennifer Lawrence — but Davis definitely is the first EGOT to do so.

 

Secret Service Agent Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez) helps President Danielle Sutton
(Viola Davis) to safety, as South Korean First Lady Han Min-Seo (MeeWha Alana Lee)
wisely follows.

(She achieved that status in 2023, when she won a Grammy Award for narrating her memoir, Finding Me, as an audiobook.)

I’d also argue that, even in full-blown battle mode, Davis is the most regal of the bunch.

 

G20 is pure hokum, but director Patricia Riggen and editors Doc Crotzer and Emma E. Hickox keep things moving rapidly enough to camouflage a plot that has more holes than the proverbial Swiss cheese. Honestly, the four credited scripters — Logan Miller, Noah Miller, Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss — could have tried a little harder.

 

(I also get a sense — given that production on this film took place in early 2024 — that all concerned envisioned this as wishful thinking about the upcoming real-world election, and cheekily built their story around a Black female U.S. president.

 

(Ah, if only...)

 

We’re introduced to President Danielle Sutton (Davis) as she’s dragged out of bed late one night, because her headstrong teenage daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) once again evaded her Secret Service handlers to sneak out of the White House. 

 

Thoroughly fed up — because the girl refuses to realize how such behavior places her in danger — Sutton and her husband, Derek (Anthony Anderson), decide to take Serena and her brother Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) to Cape Town, site of the annual G20 summit meeting, in order to keep her under strict surveillance.

 

This soon will place Serena and Demetrius in far greater danger than her midnight escapades, because...

 

...Summit security has been outsourced to a private outfit.

 

(“Stupid mistake!” we scream.)

We Live in Time: One for the ages

We Live in Time (2023) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R for profanity, nudity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.3.24

This is an eye-opening marvel: an absolutely perfect marriage of shrewd writing, skilled direction and transcendent performances.

 

Still blissed out after their first night together, Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut
(Florence Pugh) pause on their respective sides of her closed apartment door,
and quietly contemplate what might come next.

The result is a romantic drama against which all others must be compared, and found superficial and unsatisfying.

Actually, “romantic drama” is too simple a descriptor. Director John Crowley and scripter Nick Payne have concocted a captivating experience that is equal parts drama, comedy, tragedy and several other elements so intricately interwoven, that the sum is far greater than its marvelous parts.

 

All brought to solemn, cheerful, cute, catastrophic and intensely intimate life by stars Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

 

We meet Britishers Almut (Pugh) and Tobias (Garfield) as they confront a life-altering decision. She has an immediate response that would involve serious consequences; he’s more cautious and uncertain. These contrasting reactions are, we soon will learn, what initially — and continuously — defines their relationship.

 

They drive home in silence, but before we can process what just occurred, we’re yanked into Tobias’ life at another point in time: alone in a hotel room, faced with documents that must be signed. The immediate uncertainty — past or future? — establishes the means by which Crowley and Payne present this saga: as snapshots from a relationship that has spanned a decade, and (we soon realize) are being remembered in the present day.

 

To quote the film’s production notes, this is how we experience love: “in fits and starts, outside linear logic, in fleeting but indelible moments that are gorgeous, funny, high anxiety, delirious, sad and revelatory ... sometimes all at once.”

 

(Honestly, I couldn’t have said it better.)

 

I’ve generally not be impressed by films that capriciously bounce back and forth through time, like a frightened jackrabbit; the technique can be frustrating and annoying, and often doesn’t serve the story being told.

 

Crowley and Payne, however, pull it off with elegance.

 

When Tobias and Almut first meet, he’s the ultimate methodical, list-making wonk, climbing the corporate ladder at the Weetabix cereal and snack company. She’s an accomplished chef and co-owner of one of those posh London restaurants that serves meticulously garnished tiny portions that wouldn’t satisfy a starving rat. 

 

He knows what he wants, and pursues things with long-winded speeches that justify decisions; he wants children. She’s preternaturally multi-talented, and refuses to be pinned down ... while insisting on being granted the option of changing her mind. She doesn’t see herself with children.

Gemini Man: Double trouble

Gemini Man (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for considerable action violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.11.19

Nature … or nurture?

That provocative question is at the heart of Gemini Man, thanks to an unexpectedly thoughtful script from David Benioff, Darren Lemke and Billy Ray. 

No matter where our heroes go — from left, Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Brogan
(Will Smith) and Baron (Benedict Wong) — the bad guys always catch up with them ...
and quickly. How is that possible?

“Unexpected” in the sense that — during the lengthy initial act — nothing about this high-octane thriller suggests that it’ll become so philosophical.

Considerable credit also goes to director Ang Lee — an Academy Award winner for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi — who, at first blush, seems an unusual choice for such pell-mell spyjinks. But Lee has long been fascinated by angst-laden decisions thrust upon characters forced to confront long-dormant facets of themselves.

(On top of which, Lee isn’t adverse to the occasional action-laden blockbuster, having also helmed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk.)

This updated Gemini Man has virtually nothing to do with the bone-stupid 1976 TV show of the same name, wherein Ben Murphy’s secret agent Sam Casey had the power to turn invisible, but only for 15 minutes at a time, lest his radiation-induced talent kill him. The series deservedly perished after only five episodes, leaving behind nothing but the intriguing title that Lee and his scripters have developed into a far superior premise.

We meet Will Smith’s Henry Brogan — an ex-Special Forces sniper turned assassin for a clandestine U.S. government agency — as he calmly prepares for his current mission: an assignment he completes successfully. Back at home in rural Savannah, Ga., Brogan tells his long-trusted handler, Del Patterson (Ralph Brown), that he’s had enough. 

Too many kills have left Brogan unable to face his own reflection in a mirror. He simply wants to build bird houses and fish the local waterways from his tiny boat.

We’ve seen this preamble many times before; we know full well that black-ops agents — particularly assassins — never are allowed to go quietly into that good night. And that’s true here as well.

But not in the usual manner.