Really, really annoying movie because once upon a time I was into Jack Ryan novels in a big way and I've always enjoyed the movie adaptations, but they completely stuffed it. There was nothing wrong with the idea of doing a Ryan origin story - sure, they'd already turned the movie of The Sum of All Fears into one, but why not do it again? But instead of using one of the best selling source novels, several of which remain unfilmed, they thought they'd come up with an original story - and it's a crap one.
It feels as though this was done on the cheap, too. I guess Chris Pine isn't that cheap, and Ken Branagh could probably charge a little more after Thor, and Keira Knightley must have been paid something to hold her nose - but surely Kevin Costner doesn't cost that much? There's not really many other prominent characters in the movie. Spectacle is thin on the ground - there is a decent chase through the streets of Moscow and later one through New York, but in general television does this a lot better.
TV does story telling better too - which here is noticeably poor. The biggest flaw more me is the character of Ryan. The whole point of Jack Ryan was that he was a guy next door, a pencil pusher and family man who occasionally got caught in amazing adventures - an antidote to James Bond. He wanted to be a soldier but couldn't after being injured - he went into finance and made a quick fortune, then turned to academia, which led to a career in the CIA. He had a bad back, a fear of flying, a strong Irish Catholic influence, a keenly developed sense of intelligence and history - it's an interesting character. He's not gung ho Mr Macho killer - that job is given to John Clarke.
And the movies had done a decent enough job of depicting that until now - he wasn't really an ordinary guy but he was an action movie genre's version of an ordinary guy. (This is why Harrison Ford was so good).
Here Jack Ryan is just another super hero. Which might have worked (though what's the point?) but the filmmakers try to have their cake and eat it too by having him say "I'm just an analyst" and "I'm just an ordinary person" a few times. Well he isn't. For starters he enlists in the army after September 11, which makes him a moron and not true to character. Then he finishes his PhD and joins Wall Street and becomes part of the CIA because of his ability to... read patterns? Then he's sent on a mission to Russia and someone tries to kill him only Ryan gets in first in a ridiculous Daniel Craig James Bond type sequence.
This for me was the turning point of the film - when it showed that the filmmakers didn't have a vision. Because after that Pine/Ryan meets mentor Kevin Costner (played someone called Thomas Harper not in the novels... why not use John Clarke? Or Admiral Greer?) and goes on about how hard it was to kill someone the first time, you think "that's not true you found it easy, you looked like a bad ass". Then there's this horrible bit where Costner talks about his first time killing someone, an innocent bystander, and you're wondering how you're meant to take that character, who is a mentor but also distant, and there's no warmth (nothing to compare to what James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman brought).
Then we see Ryan "analyse" stuff - he really seems to brain storm and kick ideas around and guess what the baddies are up to without much proof, but he always guesses right. And for all his inexperience he manages to rescue Keira from assassins and then later on stop a terrorist by engaging in a motorbike chase and a fight on a moving truck. It's ridiculous.
So much of this is dumb. Keira Knightley looks beautiful but her role is horrible; they don't even show a courtship, just them meeting and bang they're in love - and she thinks he's having an affair (he ducks away to see Sorry Wrong Number at a revival house... way to go with updating the character), then she follows him to Moscow so she can be kidnapped (the best sequence in the movie to be fair) then she is rescued and doesn't do anything in the last third.
The action stuff lacks balls. Clancy never did - he set off an atomic bomb in the US in Sum of All Fears and had a plane crash into the White House in Debt of Honour (predicting September 11) and killed off leading characters. This is all tentative - all the goodies live the baddies die Wall Street is saved. No big stakes no nothing. It's annoying - because Ryan is such a good character who's had interesting adventures. But they completely stuffed it.
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