32 Years Later, the Definitive Jack Ryan Thriller Lands on Streaming

The Jack Ryan franchise has had no trouble reinventing itself over the years. Different actors, different eras, different political anxieties — the character has been reshaped again and again depending on what audiences wanted from a spy thriller at the time. But for a lot of people, one version still stands a little taller than the rest. And when the conversation turns to the best Jack Ryan movie, Clear and Present Danger usually ends up very near the top.

That political-thriller favorite is heading to Paramount+ on April 1. It joins the streamer’s new month of film additions and gives Harrison Ford’s second Ryan outing a new home just as audiences continue to look back fondly on the era when adult studio thrillers like this were arriving on a regular basis.

Directed by Phillip Noyce and based on the Tom Clancy novel, the 1994 film follows Ryan as he is pulled into a covert war against Colombian drug cartels after a friend of the President is murdered. As Ryan digs deeper, he realizes he is being used as the respectable public face of an operation that has gone far beyond anything he was told. That setup gives the film both its action and its bite, and it helps make this one of the more satisfying Clancy adaptations on screen.

The cast includes Ford as Jack Ryan, Willem Dafoe as John Clark, Anne Archer as Cathy Ryan, Joaquim de Almeida as Félix Cortez, Henry Czerny as Robert Ritter, Harris Yulin as James Cutter, Donald Moffat as President Bennett, and Miguel Sandoval as Ernesto Escobedo.

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Is ‘Clear and Present Danger’ Worth Watching?

Roger Ebert declared that Clear and Present Danger was an improvement on Ford’s first outing as Jack Ryan in Patriot Games, and that Ford had settled nicely into the role.

“This one is particularly dated, but Ford bounces back a bit with Clear and Present Danger, the much-better of his two films, in which Ryan becomes a power player in the CIA only to learn that the U.S. government has some pretty bloody skeletons in the closet. It’s the second-best of the Ryan films because Ford is more comfortable in the character and director Philip Noyce seems to be having some fun peeling back the layers of the onion of U.S. corruption.”

Clear and Present Danger will arrive on Paramount+ on April 1.