By Brett Blake Another decade, another attempt to re-launch Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character as a viable franchise-leader. While I don’t expect JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT will be the film to establish a new Clancy-verse cinematic franchise (based solely on the film’s rather tepid box office performance over its opening weekend), I do think it is a very solid and entertaining espionage thriller with good performances, decent action and suspense, and a fun villainous plot that feels moderately realistic… if not entirely plausible. Although the film provides a prologue establishing how Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) is recruited into the CIA by his mentor, Harper (Kevin Costner), the bulk of the story involves Ryan’s attempt to stop an attack on the United States economy by elements within the Russian government, personified by Cherevin (director Kenneth Branagh), an influential and shady Russian businessman. Other than a subplot involving Ryan’s fiance, Cathy (Keira Knightley), and her concerns about Ryan’s fidelity, the story is very straightforward, offering the kinds of spy tropes we’ve seen before (i.e. We have to hack the villain’s computer network! There’s a bomb somewhere in the city! I’m not a field operative!), but SHADOW RECRUIT somehow manages to feel at least moderately fresh, and there’s an almost nonchalant, mundane quality to the actual espionage that is a hallmark of Tom Clancy’s writing. The Ryan character has been the focus of three previous movies: 1990’s THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (featuring Alec Baldwin as Ryan), 1992’s PATRIOT GAMES (with introduced Harrison Ford as the character), 1994’s CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER (Ford again), and 2002’s THE SUM OF ALL FEARS (where Ben Affleck took on the role). Those first three films are excelllent-to-very-good (I’m not too big on SUM OF ALL FEARS, personally), and while the acting continuity was not maintained, the continuity of the character was, in the sense that Jack Ryan has always been defined by a couple very key traits - a sharp intellect and a Boy Scout-ish sense of honor and duty to country. Those traits are carried over into SHADOW RECRUIT quite effectively by Chris Pine; he plays Ryan as a fundamentally “good” man operating from a very decent place, and even though the screenplay is keen to throw him head-first into fight and chase scenes, the writers are also careful to show Ryan analyzing and breaking-down information. The character as envision by Clancy is meant to be something of a “thinking man’s reluctant action hero,” and I think this film strikes as nice a balance as you could hope for from a mainstream thriller. As the mentor/authority figure in the story, Kevin Costner does good work with a cliched character, the kind of figure we’ve seen literally in dozens of films and novels in the past decades. What make Costner interesting here are the little acting choices and semi-off-beat line readings that he gives; he brings a real sense of old-school world weariness to the part that goes a long way towards offsetting the fact that we’ve seen this character before. It seems Costner is in the middle of something of a mini renaissance (given that he’s starring in no less than three films over the next three months, SHADOW RECRUIT included), and I’m happy to see him back in a big way. Keira Knightley’s role is a somewhat thankless one by design, as there’s only so much you can do with the character within the confines of the kind of story that’s being told, but she’s fine, and is able to keep the character from being irritating, which - on the page - she could easily have been. And that brings me to Kenneth Branagh, both the director and co-star of the film. I’m not sure I’ve gone on record with my feelings vis-a-vis Branagh, so let me take a moment to do so. I’m a fan of his, both as an actor and a director. I think his directing filmography is admirably eclectic and interesting (who else could say that they’ve directed some of the finest Shakespeare adaptations of all time, plus the first film based on Marvel Comics’ Thor character, and now a high-tech spy thriller?), and in terms of performance, I’ve never seen him give anything less than his best effort (heck, one of his most fun performances is in WILD WILD WEST; a cinematic atrocity, to be sure, but he’s a blast to watch in that movie). With SHADOW RECRUIT, both of Branagh’s facets acquit themselves quite well. In his role as the villain, you can clearly feel Branagh relishing the part (particularly the Russian accent), and though he does come close to chewing some scenery - in an entertaining way - there are also a couple of moments that hit upon a modest sense of pathos surrounding the character, which fleshes him out in a nice way. (Brief digression: the villainous scheme presented in the film posits that high-ranking officials in the Russian government and business world are attempting to torpedo the American economy; given that Russia seems determined to oppose the United States on the world stage over almost every geopolitical issue of note, I found the movie’s plot to be not too terribly far afield from the sort of crazy maneuver some in Russia might wish they could pull off. I suppose that’s just my way of saying I don’t think Russia currently operates in good faith, and this movie plays right into that notion. I'm now stepping away from the soapbox.) Branagh-as-director seems to have taken his cue from several different sources, from Clancy’s novels (obviously), to films like THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and the BOURNE series. Indeed, the action feels particularly Bourne-inflected, in the sense that it’s frenetic and exciting… if perhaps just a tad too jittery. That said, Branagh’s trademark ability to stage dialogue and conversations in interesting ways is very much evident in the movie’s best scene, where Pine, Costner, and their CIA team attempt to piece together the evidence pointing towards an imminent attack in New York City. It’s a classic Clancy-esque scene, and Branagh treats it with appropriate weight and energy. All things told, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT doesn’t quite hit the heights of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER or PATRIOT GAMES, but it’s right on par with CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, and as a spy yarn, it could have been a whole lot worse. All around, it's a solid entertainment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
|