Jack Ryan is novelist Tom Clancy’s greatest creation. A hero born of the cold war, who found himself in terrible circumstances time and again, and was still able to maintain some level of control. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t the strongest, or the most skilled, and he certainly wasn’t debonair. Jack Ryan was an analyst–an economics major–who started out as a Marine and then went to work for the CIA to look at numbers and ended up the President of the United States. You gotta love fiction.
With Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Paramount pictures is trying to reboot the character for a second time, after 2002’s Sum of All Fears starring Ben Affleck. The character of Jack Ryan had been played previously by Alec Baldwin (Hunt for Red October) and Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, A Clear and Present Danger), and Paramount–needing its own version of Universal’s Jason Bourne or MGM/UA/Sony’s James Bond–wanted to go back to the beginning to shape Ryan into the hero that is more in tune with moviegoers demands and less with fans of the literature. The end result is hit and miss.
The film opens with young Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) attending school in London and witnessing the September 11th attacks on TV. Next we shoot off to 2003 Afghanistan, where in response to the attacks, Ryan has enlisted with the Marines and is on a mission, flying to a location in the mountains in the back of a Huey helicopter. This is the ill-fated helicopter crash that would end his career as a Marine.
Next, Ryan is in physical therapy with a beautiful med student, Cathy Muller (Kiera Knightley), who uses the “carrot-on-a-stick” of a date to get Ryan walking again–without the painkillers that he is addicted to. While in therapy, Tom Harper (Kevin Costner) takes interest and as the therapy ends, he recruits Ryan into the CIA. This is all in the first 10 minutes of the film, and all before the opening credits.
This works to modernize the character, for the most part, as Harper is created for this film as Vice-Admiral Greer, Ryan’s original benefactor, is no longer a part of the mythos. Any other tie to Ryan and his literary roots essentially ends here as the cinematic Jack Ryan–young, good looking, trained to kill with his bare hands–takes over and the silliness ensues.
Director Kenneth Branagh (Thor), who also stars as main Russian baddie, Viktor Cherevin, does a decent job staging the film and the pace is well done. In fact, the script by Adam Cozad and David Koepp would be a good–albeit silly–script had Jack Ryan not been a part of it. By trying to take this well-established literary and film character and forcing him to fit into the parameters of this story doesn’t work for me. Part of this reason is due to the fact that all of this is unnecessary.
In the books, Tom Clancy, who passed away last year, had already set up the Ryanverse for the future by turning Ryan’s son, Jack Jr. into the hero of the recent books. As I watched Shadow Recruit, I could not help but wonder why Paramount didn’t tap that character for this–even going so far as making Jack Sr. President of the United States (Alec Baldwin could have cameoed for a huge nod to long-time Ryan fans). This would have made the most sense, but then again, when has Hollywood, especially the studio system in Hollywood, ever made sense?
And Branagh’s Cherevin is a Bond villain. Pure and simple. Right down to the fact that he is terminally ill as wants to make one last statement before he goes for some wrong that was committed years before. It is almost as if Cozad and Koepp found an Ian Fleming Madlibs and began filling in the blanks. Knightley is okay as Muller, especially in the beginning, but as the film goes on, her character becomes a sketch in ridiculousness to the point where she is now running a CIA operation with no training. Knightley is better than this, and her last few lines are delivered so terribly that I actually lost respect for her as a performer.
Chris Pine’s performance is much better than I expected. For an actor who seems shallow on the surface, Pine is able to surprise, much like he did in Tony Scott’s Unstoppable. I’m confident that Pine can carry an action flick that isn’t a reboot, if only Paramount would let him. Pine has the chops needed, and Shadow Recruit is not a scale to measure his talent. Even so, as I watched this, my brain kept trying to picture him more as Jack Ryan Jr., and that image fit so much better than him trying to pull off the Jack Ryan that I know and love.
And I know, I should not be trying to compare the two versions of the characters, but when you film a reboot, you invite these comparisons and it makes it virtually impossible not to hold each up to the same standards.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is an okay thriller unabashedly using established characters to try and cash in and/or create a new franchise. What follows is a paint-by-numbers story, with James Bond films as the blueprint. What makes it worse is that the plans were in place for the natural reboot to occur with Ryan’s son, but everyone in power seemingly ignored that.
Shadow Recruit might make some money, and might warrant a sequel, and the next film will be even further away from the Jack Ryan that Tom Clancy created 30 years ago this year (Hunt for Red October, the first Jack Ryan novel, was originally published in 1984). The whole franchise and talents of those involved would be better off making their own mythos and letting Jack Ryan rest.
