3. Alec Baldwin/Harrison Ford - Jack Ryan
Jack Ryan is one of those "iconic" action heroes, like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt from the
Mission: Impossible franchise, who is kind of, like, boring. Not bad, by any means, but you feel like you don't really know him in the same way you do Indiana Jones or Tony Stark: he feels interchangeable, at best. My point is further cemented by the fact that Jack Ryan has been played on the big screen by three different very famous actors, and nobody really cares. Still, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford both gave the character two very solid incarnations, and Jack and Ryan are still two words that make sense next to each other in a way that people recognise "it's that secret agent from those books," I suppose. I'm losing my train of thought. Okay, here it is. Alec Baldwin was the first person to play Jack Ryan, in John McTiernan's submarine thriller,
The Hunt For Red October. He was good in it, of course, because Alec Baldwin is always good. But Harrison Ford injected Ryan with an added action movie oomph - when Baldwin refused to return for a sequel, Ford was the man who turned up on the set and took on the character for two ventures,
Clear and Present Danger, and
Patriot Games. And Ford was somewhat better than Baldwin in ways I can't really justify, because it's kind of a toss-up. They were both good. How's that?
Another actor played Jack Ryan that I'm failing to mention, you say? I've purposely chosen not to say anything about that here because it was awful, and because he's done so well recently and I don't want to name and shame the guy for no reason (Ben Affleck! It was Ben Affleck!).