James Bond Meets Jason Bourne In Prime Video's 107-Minute Action Thriller

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Published Aug 11, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

The double whammy of Austin Powers and The Bourne Identity rejuvenated the James Bond franchise. The Bond formula had been working a charm since the 1960s, but as it entered its fifth decade, it started to feel a little stale and outdated. In the early 2000s, Pierce Brosnan’s 007 adventures doubled down on all the series’ worst instincts: cartoonish humor, ridiculous gadgets, one-dimensional villains. It was time for a change, and Bourne and Austin Powers facilitated that change.

After Mike Myers had pointed out the absurdity of all the Bond tropes in the Austin Powers movies, Paul Greengrass brought those tropes into the real world in the Bourne sequels, and showed the world just how cool a realistic spy thriller could be. The Bond producers took note, and when it came time to reboot the franchise after Brosnan’s tenure unceremoniously ended with Die Another Day, they ditched all the clichés that Austin Powers had lampooned and planted Daniel Craig’s Bond in a more grounded, Bourne-style reality.

This gritty realism reinvigorated the franchise, and Casino Royale was hailed as the best Bond movie since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 37 years earlier. After Bourne and Casino Royale and Batman Begins had all made gritty realism the cool new thing in Hollywood, the next decade’s worth of action cinema was heavily influenced by that style. Zack Snyder made Superman a dour antihero, the Russo brothers put Captain America at the center of a Pakula-style conspiracy thriller, and Amazon brought back Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan with the coolness of Bond and the grit of Bourne.

The John Wick franchise has since injected some flair and suspension of disbelief back into the action genre, so the pendulum has swung back the other way. But we got some great action thrillers out of the era of darker and edgier.

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War Is The Last Gasp Of Post-Bourne Grit

Jack Ryan peering around a corner in Ghost War

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, as the John Wick effect was giving us hyperstylized actioners like Atomic Blonde and Nobody and its own spinoff movie Ballerina, the last few Bourne-inspired, Casino Royale-inspired gritty spy thrillers were still making their way down the development pipeline. When it debuted on Prime Video, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan felt like a refreshing throwback to that grounded, Greengrass-style approach to the spy genre, just as it was going out of fashion.

After running for 30 episodes across four seasons, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan aired its series finale in 2023. But, as with any big Amazon streaming franchise, the end wasn’t really the end. Just because Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is over, it doesn’t mean Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is over. Prime was planning to expand the universe with a spinoff series, starring Michael Peña as Ding Chavez, and a sequel movie. While the former died in development hell, the latter was released on Amazon’s streaming-waves earlier this year.

When Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan premiered eight years ago, it felt like a throwback to a bygone era of action cinema. Now that that era is eight years more bygone, the movie — Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War — feels even more like a throwback. It’s strangely nostalgic to watch a shaky Bourne-style thriller in a slick post-Wick world; they don’t make them like this anymore.

The character of Jack Ryan has been around for decades, but the TV show and its movie adaptation (and, honestly, most modern spy thrillers) share tonal and stylistic similarities with Craig’s Bond movies and the Bourne movies. The grit and intensity and paranoia of those movies was heavily influenced by the post-9/11 political climate, and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan has come along at a similarly fraught time in the geopolitical landscape.