TOM CLANCY’S JACK RYAN: GHOST WAR

Here's the tension this movie creates. It's a genuinely good spy thriller — well produced, well written, well paced, with old cast members slipping right back into their roles and a story that never loses momentum between its intrigue and its action. If craft alone decided the verdict, this would be an easy recommendation for thriller fans.

But craft isn't the only measure. GHOST WAR piles on excessive foul language — Movieguide counts more than 39 obscenities, nine uses of Christ's name in vain, and nine GD profanities — alongside very strong, intense violence: throat-slitting, gunfire, a car bomb, a helicopter mini-gun turned on a building. Add kidnapping, lying, and treason to the mix, and the content simply outweighs the merit.

The patriotic, good-versus-evil themes are real and worth admiring. They're just buried under content that makes this one unacceptable to recommend. Skip this one, whatever your age.

Dr. Jack Ryan has traded the CIA for Wall Street, trying to settle into a quiet civilian life as a financial analyst. That quiet ends when his old friend and former commanding officer, James Greer — now deputy director of the CIA — pulls him back in for what's supposed to be a simple assignment.

It isn't. Jack finds himself tangled in a plot two decades in the making, teaming up with old allies and a new one, MI6 operative Emma Marlow, to stop a rogue former operative from reviving the very terrorist networks the CIA once worked to dismantle.

Three stars means this is a genuinely strong piece of filmmaking, and the source review is clear about why. The cast falls back into its old roles with ease, bringing real intrigue to familiar characters. The pacing — usually the hardest thing for a spy thriller to get right — is handled well here, balancing espionage, action, and exposition without losing the audience.

Its one real flaw is structural: GHOST WAR leans so heavily on four seasons of series backstory that it doesn't work as a standalone film. Callbacks and implied history pile up for viewers who haven't watched the show. It's a well-made sequel, not a fresh entry point.

What this film gets right is worth naming plainly: a strong, patriotic, moral worldview built around a clear line between good and evil. Jack Ryan and James Greer both work toward the same end — protecting the innocent, at real cost to themselves — even though they get there differently. Ryan operates from a black-and-white moral clarity that, without ever saying so outright, implies belief in something higher than himself. Greer, by contrast, trusts his own emotions to tell him what's right, a more romantic and self-directed conscience. The film also frames the CIA itself as working, however messily, for the good of ordinary citizens — a hopeful, if simplified, picture of institutional service.

Where the film falls short isn't in what it believes but in how it says it. A story built on doing right despite surrounding darkness is undercut by dialogue soaked in profanity and violence played at maximum intensity — the very things that make the darkness harder to walk through cleanly with your own conscience intact.

The ache underneath this story — good people risking everything to protect others from evil they can't fully see coming — echoes something Scripture asks of all of us: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8).

GHOST WAR is proof that good filmmaking and good content aren't the same question. This one is sharply made, sharply acted, and genuinely patriotic in spirit — and still buried under language and violence that make it unacceptable to recommend. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something safer for tonight? Start with our.