Jack Ryan Wrap-Up
Clear and Present Danger follows Patriot Games and also stars Harrison Ford. It involves drug cartels in South America [those, sadly, still exist], and the movie is quite frankly boring. There’s no action until an hour into the movie. It doesn’t get interesting until the last half hour. Jack keeps getting sent into the field even though he’s only an analyst. But he handles himself reasonably well in a fight.
There’s the threat of a political scandal reaching all the way to the President [and I have to stop and think, when this takes place, Nixon and Watergate were recent memory.] But Jack is determined to do what is right; Admiral Greer’s final advice to Jack (he passes away from cancer in this film, so Jack has to do his job) is Jack took an oath to the people, not just the President. And Jack will not let the mess that happened stand. And this is why I dislike politics; everyone is out to screw everyone else over. One man takes it upon themselves, at the President’s quasi-orders, to start an unauthorized war in Colombia and of course there is corruption within the cartels and people will take advantage of a situation and innocent people end up getting hurt. The first two Jack Ryan movies are much better.
Sum of All Fears came out in 2002 as a quasi-reboot and was not well received, particularly in my family. It completely threw the book out the window. We watched it once and refuse to ever watch it again.
Shadow Recruit is a more proper reboot from 2014 with an all-star cast. Chris Pine is now Jack Ryan, Keira Knightley is his girlfriend, Cathy. Kevin Costner is Jack’s handler, Harper, and Kenneth Branagh directs and plays the Russian villain. It’s not based off of one of Clancy’s books; it re-imagines Jack post-9/11. Actually, the film opens with the television report of the attack on the World Trade Center [bad timing, I managed to re-watch the film the evening of September 10th.] Jack enlists and deploys to Afghanistan; there is a helicopter attack like the typical backstory and Jack meets Cathy during his physical therapy. Harper recruits him because he notices patterns others miss.
It’s a good action film and continues to demonstrate that Jack Ryan is an analyst, not a field agent. Of course, he survives and Chris Pine is an excellent leading man and handles action very well. Even watching the film more than once, it keeps the suspense.
There is a recent series titled Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan that airs on Amazon Prime. I have not watched it (I think I’ll keep to my originals, thanks. And I really don’t need another series to get involved in)
Next Time: After the holidays, we will return to Harrison Ford in Air Force One. Never fear, I’m not going anywhere, just trying to make time for reading and my own writing; and balance a job. I love action movies, so I definitely want to cover these…and we haven’t even hit the major movies that claimed my heart and soul!
Dreamer in the Mirror 