There have been many incarnations of the Jack Ryan character on-screen over the years, from Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October to Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger to Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears.

The latest sees Captain Kirk himself Chris Pine take on the role in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which pulls a Batman Begins and takes the character right back to his origins. After recovering from a helicopter attack that left him almost unable to walk, he is recruited into the CIA by the appropriately secretive Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner) where he soon discovers a sinister Russian terrorist plot to crash the US economy.

The latest Jack Ryan offering isn’t terrible in any way but wholly unremarkable. It’s a by-the-number spy thriller that stands in the shadow of not only most of the franchise’s previous instalments (save for, maybe, The Sum of All Fears) but other all-pervading franchises like Bourne and Bond. From its obligatory love interest (played by Keira Knightley) to its generic baddie (played by director Kenneth Branagh) and predictably placed action beats, it all just feels run-of-the-mill.

The film drags the franchise firmly into the 2nd decade of the 21st century with a plot surrounding threat of financial destruction, as well as throwing in the physical threat of an actual terrorist attack in order to up the immediacy of the action and, essentially, give Jack the opportunity to run around manically trying to save the day. In fairness it does a better job of most similar films over the last few years of making it feel current and relevant with its risk of imminent danger – either to Jack himself or the world at large – but unfortunately it mostly squanders that believability with a baddie straight out of a bad ‘80s spy thriller. Played with a hugely distracting thick Russian accent by Branagh (who also directs here), he might as well be twiddling a moustache and laughing maniacally while he quietly goes about making his country proud.

While Knightley is playing a fairly generic love-interest character, she’s actually one of the better aspects of the film. A scene in which she tries to distract Branagh’s evil terrorist with her beauty, charm and knowledge of Russian literature while Jack is trying to hack into his secure computer network is a film highlight. Kevin Costner rounds out the top tier cast, although his character is basically there as marker for the audience who may not get/care about the complicated economic jargon; at one point he actually states “Talk me through your very scary scenario… keep in mind I don’t have your PhD.”

The film also suffers from the fact that the character of Jack Ryan himself (and this may not be true in the books which I admit I haven’t read) who just isn’t that compelling. It worked fine in the past with the charisma of the likes of Baldwin and Ford, and while Pine is actually quite clever casting as the new incarnation and plenty charismatic in his own right, it feels more like a post-Bourne heightened action world and thus throwing this type of character into these situations doesn’t really work. He’s supposed to be this everyman whom we can all relate to as a fish-out-of-water trying his best to handle whatever action-filled situation arises but the issue is he’s not really that relatable; he’s a genius computer analyst. So the film sits in this awkward middle ground with the character that it never quite overcomes.

Branagh’s direction is efficient and he has delivered a film that, at a surprisingly short 105 minute runtime, doesn’t have the usual layers of fat that need trimmed. It’s simply that it never rises above the level of the ordinary, content to aim for what’s become expected of the genre, only just about getting by on a few admittedly fun set-pieces but nothing more.

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