Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
The last time Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst came to the big-screen, it was a forgettable affair with Ben Affleck. (Don’t remember “The Sum of All Fears?” I’m sure Affleck would prefer it that way.) Now, Paramount is trying to reboot the character yet again with an “original” origin story, so long as you don’t mean “original” in the literal sense, ’cause there’s a lot of borrowing from James Bond and Jason Bourne going on here from screenwriters David Koepp and Adam Cozad and director Kenneth Branagh, keeping with the potential blockbuster filmmaking he did with “Thor.”
How did they do? Surprisingly well, in fact. Granted, “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games,” and “Clear and Present Danger” have nothing to worry about in terms of their place in the franchise, but star Chris Pine (used to rebooting iconic characters from his time in the “Star Trek” films) does a good job with the role– physical enough to make us buy him as an action hero, but also grounded enough so that we can accept him as an analyst whom gets in over his head, a combination that hasn’t really been plausibly shown since “Patriot Games.”
As presented in “Shadow Recruit,” Ryan is going to school as an economical analyst when 9/11 happens, and his sense of duty leads him to join the Marines. While on a mission in Afghanistan, Ryan’s helicopter is hit by a missile, and Ryan is badly injured as he tries to save two of his fellow soldiers. While in rehab back at Walter Reed, he meets physical therapist Cathy (Kiera Knightley, not really pulling off the accent, but does well enough in the role, nonetheless), and is kept an eye on by a man named Harper (Kevin Costner), who recruits him for the CIA as an economic analyst tracing terrorist money. Three years later, he and Cathy, now a brilliant doctor, are very much in love, but not yet married (not easy since Jack can’t tell her the truth about what he does), and Jack is investigating a series of Russian financial transactions within a Wall Street company he works for. He has to go deeper, though, and ends up in Russia talking with the head of the company in charge of those mysterious transactions. Since the head of the company is played by Branagh himself, you can probably guess things aren’t quite on the up-and-up.
The comparisons to James Bond and Jason Bourne are apt; after all, once Harrison Ford got in the role with “Patriot Games,” Paramount did what they could to turn Jack Ryan into a Bond-like hero, and honestly, it’s impossible to watch this film without thinking of the nice little franchise Universal set up with Robert Ludlam’s character. Part of the reason “Patriot Games” worked best in terms of setting up Jack Ryan as an action hero is because, despite Harrison Ford playing the role, he was very much an ordinary guy (an analyst, no less) thrown into extraordinary circumstances through a sense of right and wrong. It’s been too long to really recall “Hunt for Red October,” but I know neither “Clear and Present Danger” nor “Sum of All Fears” really succeeded quite as well in that respect. And even though it gives into the “big action finale” mentality of modern blockbusters at the end, when “Shadow Recruit” plays to the everyman qualities of the character (and lets Pine play off of that with Costner and Knightley), it’s a successful reintroduction to the character. I don’t know if we’ll see more films about the late Clancy’s character, but if we do, I think Pine, Knightley (accent issues aside), and Costner set up a good framework with which to build on what they set up here.
