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Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes
Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: The year's first movie with a three-digit IQ. Read more
Alex Pappademas, Grantland: I'm aware that commercial and cultural forces require everything to be rebooted triennially with fresher, hotter stars. But this is the second time the Jack Ryan franchise has rejected a youth transplant. Read more
Kyle Smith, New York Post: Soundly structured, smart and fast, with a plausible central scenario, several gripping moments and well-wrought dialogue. Read more
Rex Reed, New York Observer: The dim star wattage in this fifth rehash is palpable from the start. Read more
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: This is moviemaking in a modular mode, an inspiration-free action adventure-with cheesy cinematography-that fills its modest running time by fitting together familiar elements into something reliably, even insistently, not new. Read more
Soren Anderson, Seattle Times: "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" is an origin story that gets the late Tom Clancy's signature superspy right. Read more
Justin Chang, Variety: This conspicuous attempt to breathe new life into a long-dormant action franchise gets at least a few things right, chiefly the shrewd casting of Chris Pine. Read more
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AV Club: An awkward amalgam of tropes from two different sub-genres, with terrorist sleeper cells and gangster oligarchs operating side by side. Read more
Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: Kenneth Branagh ... keeps things moving, building suspense at the right times. But he never manages anything truly revelatory; this all is a version of things we've seen before. Read more
Jake Coyle, Associated Press: Branagh endows his film with (mostly) old-fashioned competency - something often lacking in today's action films - but little to distinguish it from superior thrillers that have come before. Read more
Mark Feeney, Boston Globe: "Jack Ryan" is slick, loud, assured, overplotted (way overplotted), fairly diverting, and pretty much empty. Read more
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit," well acted up and down, feels caught halfway between being an idiotic spy picture for adolescents, and a reasonably grown-up thriller for reasonably grown-up grown-ups. Read more
Tom Long, Detroit News: Branagh runs through all of this efficiently enough, but it feels awfully familiar. Read more
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Costner is in fine dry form, Knightley is at her most open and gorgeous, and Pine goes through the motions of saving the Western world with a swaggery concentration that keeps you watching. Read more
Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: Instead of embracing dramatic complexities and setbacks, all the better to make the most of them creatively, screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp are intent upon steamrolling right over them, to uninvolving effect. Read more
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" comes off as a reasonable facsimile, serviceable but not compelling, something that could pass for the real thing if you're not looking too hard. Read more
Connie Ogle, Miami Herald: Director Kenneth Branagh knows how to invest the ridiculous with a sort of grandeur - Exhibit A: the surprisingly fun Thor - but Shadow Recruit is more straightforward in nature, so he can't get too fancy. Read more
Rafer Guzman, Newsday: Pine brings a welcome boyishness and idealism to Ryan, but he's clobbered with cliches by his director and screenwriters. The evildoers, it turns out, were right in his own backyard. Read more
David Denby, New Yorker: "Shadow Recruit" is fun in a minor, winter-season way. Read more
Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: A promising start to a probable new franchise, and an early bright spot on the late winter film calendar. Read more
Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: The film certainly makes up in verve what it lacks in imagination. Read more
A.O. Scott, New York Times: "Shadow Recruit" is a competently made, moderately diverting variation on a genre standard. Read more
Michael Sragow, Orange County Register: The cast brings welcome personality to a competent, energetic reboot before the uninspired action scenes pile up in a standard time-bomb climax. Read more
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Too much of the action in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit takes place on laptops, thumb drives, and video monitors. Read more
James Berardinelli, ReelViews: The core essentials that made the previous Jack Ryan movies accessible and enjoyable remain intact in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, even if many of the individual pieces have changed. Read more
Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com: This is the very definition of an OK thriller. Read more
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: As espionage thrillers go, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit skillfully marshals all the familiar elements. That's the damn problem. Read more
Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle: Under taut direction from Kenneth Branagh (who also plays the Russian heavy), Pine is convincing as a character who is pushing papers one day, and dodging assassins in Moscow the next. Read more
Adam Nayman, Globe and Mail: Almost 25 years later, Jack: Ryan Shadow Recruit tries its best to reignite the Cold War, with tepid results. Read more
Linda Barnard, Toronto Star: The dialogue is quick and sharp and there are flourishes to make a spy movie lover smile: sleight-of-hand work and the exchange of a brown envelope in a movie theatre showing 1948 black-and-white classic Sorry, Wrong Number. Read more
Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: Even if Shadow Recruit isn't up to the recent highs of the 007 series, it's a zippy and exciting little cloak and dagger tale that's entertaining enough to make a new Ryan franchise seem like something worth anticipating. Read more
Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Pine is never going to successfully pull off weight-of-the-world anxiety: His expression in Shadow Recruit's first moments, set on 9/11, might be called "aggrieved puppy." Read more
Claudia Puig, USA Today: The film is slow in getting started and once it's underway it's only intermittently involving. It's also occasionally far-fetched. Read more
Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is half silliness, half swagger, but Branagh's arms-akimbo impudence as a director makes it work. He takes it all seriously, but with a wink. Read more
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Branagh, who proved his action bona fides with "Thor," does an inarguably competent job of choreographing a modestly intelligent espionage thriller, even if it's impossible to identify anything new he's bringing to an already groaning table. Read more