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F<\/span>or years, author Tom Clancy\u2019s Jack Ryan character was a fixture of the multiplex, with movies providing reluctant-leading-man-of-action opportunities for Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. Most of them were hits. (Sorry, Chris!) In that context, it might seem a little low-rent that the newest character\u2019s newest adventure, Jack Ryan: Ghost War, is actually a made-for-streaming continuation of an Amazon TV series, where John Krasinski takes over the CIA analyst role. But there are potential advantages to this approach, too: four seasons of the show can establish the character and his world, relieving the movie version of the full reboot burden. (No small thing for a familiar character who\u2019s nonetheless been played by five different guys.) In particular, the existence of the hit show eliminates the standard waffling over what stage of Ryan\u2019s career he should start in. Let the TV show handle the salad-days stuff, and the movie can join him mid-career without requiring several box office successes to get there.<\/p>\n And to its credit, Jack Ryan: Ghost War manages to stand alone quite well despite the preceding 30 episodes of set-up. (I certainly don\u2019t remember them all with crystal clarity, and I was never lost on a plot level.) Less fortuitously, it\u2019s more coherent than competent, especially compared with the previous movie versions. That might not seem like a fair fight, but Ghost War does position itself as some kind of movie after four seasons of serialized television; there must be some reason for this new framework, whether it\u2019s a bigger budget, a more pulse-pounding story or a chance to put Krasinski alongside his predecessors. (He\u2019s already played Ryan for more hours than any of them.) By the end of its 105 minutes, though, the movie seems to eliminate the most obvious possibilities, and its reason for being hangs in the air.<\/p>\n Ghost War rejoins Ryan, who has quit the CIA and landed a job with a hedge fund, hoping for a shot at the normal life his cloak-and-dagger past has denied him. (His normal life apparently must involve unfathomable wealth.) Then his old boss James Greer (Wendell Pierce), deputy director of the CIA, resurfaces to ask Ryan for a minor favor during an upcoming business trip to Dubai. But a quick (if elusively described) meet and drop-off becomes more complicated when the other guy is murdered mere feet away from Ryan. Soon the ex-agent and his former colleague\/current contractor Mike November (Michael Kelly) are tenuously joining forces with MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller), tracking a plot to reactivate terrorist groups.<\/p>\n