The first (and still best) entry in a perpetually rebooting franchise comes up for air on streaming

Under most circumstances, you’d think that a franchise peaking with its very first installment would prevent an endless slew of reboots, but John McTiernan’s classic The Hunt for Red October was merely the first step in an ongoing Jack Ryan saga that still shows no signs of slowing down.

Harrison Ford is arguably the best of the four actors to play the character, but Alec Baldwin still headlined the best movie. Ben Affleck and Chris Pine suffered from being surrounded by mediocrity in The Sum of All Fears and Shadow Recruit respectively, while John Krasinski bowing out of Prime Video’s show after four seasons isn’t even the end when a spinoff is already in the works.

When you take the director of Die Hard, hand a plum role to Sean Connery, and fill up the ensemble cast with an insanely talented roster of supporting players that numbers Tim Curry, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Stellan Skarsgård, Courtney B. Vance, Sam Neill, and many more, then The Hunt for Red October was destined to be a top-tier action thriller from the very first day of shooting.

It’s still the top-rated Jack Ryan adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes to this day, as well as the second highest-grossing at the box office, and the fact FlixPatrol has named it as one of the most-watched features on the Google Play Movies charts indicates that the frenetic underwater adventure still has enough air in its lungs to capture the imagination of a modern audience, adding never-ending exclamation points to its credentials as the cream of the crop.