Widescreen: 'Clear and Present Danger' is the best appetizer for Amazon's 'Jack Ryan'

Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's popular CIA analyst who has starred in 21 novels and five movies, comes to the small screen Friday, Aug. 31, in Amazon Prime's aptly named "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan." John Krasinski, the writer/director/star of this year's horror smash "A Quiet Place," takes a lead role that has been previously occupied by the all-star team of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. (Yes, Chris Pine - you've already forgotten the 2014 movie "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit," and everyone involved is probably better off.)

The talent behind the camera for the "Jack Ryan" TV series is impressive: Former "Lost" writers Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland are credited as co-creators. Michael Bay serves as executive producer alongside Krasinski. The directors include Morten Tyldum ("The Imitation Game") and Daniel Sackheim ("Game of Thrones"). Joining Krasinski in the cast are Abbie Cornish ("Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Wendell Pierce ("The Wire"), Peter Fonda and Timothy Hutton.

Amazon's confident that "Jack Ryan" will be a hit - it's already ordered a second season that adds Noomi Rapace ("Prometheus") as a German intelligence officer. Ryan's been a hitmaker for 31 years, ever since "Patriot Games" first hit bookstores. In the interim, he's been the focus of one bona fide cable classic ("The Hunt for Red October," with Baldwin and Sean Connery) and ascended to the office of the presidency in the 1994 novel "Debt of Honor."

Ryan's best big-screen adventure

That year also brought Ford's second and best go-round as Ryan in "Clear and Present Danger," based on the 1989 novel. It's a sprawling thriller about the president (Donald Moffat, giving a performance that seems to have informed Gregory Itzin's deliciously two-faced commander-in-chief on "24") waging a secret war against the Colombian drug cartel. Phillip Noyce, who also directed Ford in the middling adaptation of "Patriot Games," and screenwriters (including John Milius and Steven Zaillian) make every moment of their 141-minute runtime count with overlapping storylines and exciting setpieces.

One of those is an ambush on an FBI motorcade that ends with brutal rocket explosions. Even better, perhaps, is an unconventional faceoff between Ford's Ryan and a corrupt CIA director played by the great Henry Czerny (Ethan Hunt's icy superior from the first "Mission: Impossible") that unfolds at computer terminals in neighboring offices before exploding into a tense actors' showcase.

This movie has familiar, likable actors in every corner. James Earl Jones and Anne Archer reprise their roles as Ryan's mentor and wife. Willem Dafoe leads a black-ops team in Colombia that includes Benjamin Bratt and Raymond Cruz, better known to "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" viewers as drug lord Tuco Salamanca. And Joaquim de Almeida's long career playing suave villains in American films ("Fast Five") and TV shows ("24") began here.

"Clear and Present Danger" belongs to the pantheon of intelligent thrillers made for grown-ups in the 1990s - remember "Primal Fear"? "The Rainmaker"? "Copycat"? You can watch it with your Amazon Prime or Hulu subscriptions, rent or buy it from digital retailers, or watch for free at tubitv.com.

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald multiplatform editor. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.