Good dishes from traditional ingredients: the bingeworthy Jack Ryan series

In cooking, we mostly use the same ingredients and the genius, if we have any, is to make something better from them than others do. Or than we did last time.

Some particularly smart chefs, of course, sometimes find a new ingredient, perhaps a new spice, that brings a different and previously unimagined flavour to a dish. But mostly, what distinguishes them is that they do things better than others with the same raw materials.

What’s true of clever cooking can also be true of clever film-making. That’s the case of the Jack Ryan series, the Amazon creation of which the second season was released on Prime at the beginning of the month.

John Krasinski (right) as Jack Ryan, with
Wendell Pierce as his nominal boss, actually sidekick, James Greer

The ingredients are the standard ones of the genre – the spy action movie. Men whose real talents are underestimated by their superiors and are bound to a desk though, as we shall soon discover, they’re unbeatable in the (violent) field, exquisitely skilful with a gun and their ability to outfox the wiliest of opponents. The wiliest of opponents up to their devious and nefarious best to inflict terrible damage on the good guys (generally the US) on behalf of some very bad guys (vicious jihadists or corrupt South American autocrats). Good guys who, with a handful of people or even a single good guy, can take on practically an army of bad guys, wiping them all out at no more than a scratch or a couple of injuries to their side.

‘Injuries’ being a relative term, in any case, as on the side of the good guys even a bullet wound is insufficient to keep them out of action for more than few hours.

Above all, and this is particularly a specialty of American films of this type, there are traitors everywhere. Take that guy who rescues the protagonist from a pit of alligators (I speak metaphorically here: this is no spoiler). Expect to discover later that he’s in the pay of the other side and will hand that same protagonist over for torture and (possibly) execution by his vile accomplices at a critical point in the twisting plot.

So there’s nothing new in the Jack Ryan universe. What the series relies on is ingenuity in how the old ingredients are put together. And that, to my astonishment, both seasons do spectacularly well. It means the stories are compelling, the action fast-paced and engaging, even the suspense is gripping – however old the devices, somehow I found myself wondering how things were going to turn out, even though a different part of my brain was telling me I already knew.

Like a good meal made from traditional ingredients, the cookery for Jack Ryan works well. It produces highly palatable dishes, well worth trying. They teach nothing, they offer no insights, but they’re highly enjoyable.

What’s more, the second series is as much fun as the first.

If you have access to Prime and you like a quickfire, amusing and tense yarn, you could do a lot worse than spend two or three evenings bingeing on this series.