Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Director: Phillip Noyce

Cast: Harrison Ford, Willem Dafoe, Anne Archer, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: I’ve sometimes compared a film that doesn’t quite work as well as it should to a casserole dish filled with uncooked ingredients. Everything good is there, but the total is less than the sum of its parts. Clear and Present Danger is something different. It is entertaining enough. It certainly clings to the ethos that permeates throughout the Jack Ryan series of films that eschews Clancy’s later instinct to believe his own press*. Ford has yet to start his prolonged period of of sleepwalking through entire films. It’s all good.

And yet…

Something still doesn’t add up. Ford and Noyce are doing better work in Patriot Games (1992). Greer (Jones)—just about the only constant throughout this series—is dispatched in what feels like the kind of thing meant to propel Ryan (Ford) through the third act of the story. Willem Dafoe is always nice to see, especially in a film released before we really knew what we had with him, but he also feels just a tad miscast*. I even prefer Henry Czerny playing essentially the same role in Mission: Impossible (1996), and again in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025). Ultimately, the story is more than a little too self-conscious for its own good. I almost wish the film would have hued closer to what I was imagine was in John Milius’ original screenplay. I mean, he was the only who has been able to do anything with Conan, so his bite might just have been the right ingredient for this.

All of it is almost right, and the sum total of the movie is pretty good. As such, it is less of an uncooked casserole, and more of a fully cooked casserole made up of a cacophony of leftovers.

I did not think this review of a Tom Clancy movie would have quite so many uses of the word “casserole.”

*A big reason why the film series has struggled to get its act together after this film, despite two or three attempts.

**If I remember correctly, Clancy would have preferred Tom Selleck in the row, and not to be caught on the record agreeing with late Mr. Clancy, but I can see it.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Yup.

Did I Like It: So, lately I’ve been listening to many of the later (read: preposterously impossible to be adapted to film) Tom Clancy novels via audio book and before we get into this film, I think now is as good a time as any to get some things off my chest. Never have I ever been through such a more progressively ridiculous set of events in my life, and I include both the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Trump presidency in that statement. Why have I subjected myself to these interminable tomes? Well, I had purchased Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears (read, those Clancy books which were begrudgingly—by all parties—adapted to film) on Audible and with my reading goal for 2021 well passed, I could take some chances on some books I only bought on an ill-defined impulse. By the time I was in the middle of Fears—which at least partially hinges on a subplot involving Ryan’s bout of erectile dysfunction*--I was “Jim-ing” an unseen camera so often, that John Krasinski’s eventual casting finally made sense. I kept going because the knowledge that Ryan’s supreme intelligence and only-honest-man-in-town-ness propels him into the Presidency… for reasons. It’s time I’ll never get back, and by the time of Executive Orders when Ryan addresses the nation and applauds his fellow citizens for making responsible decisions for themselves in the efforts to stem an outbreak of airborne Ebola, I laughed so hard at my car’s stereo, I fear I may have hurt my Honda Civic’s feelings.

Tom Clancy is garbage. He continues to be garbage, and he’s been dead for nearly ten years.

But, here’s the good news! None of the later—and even occasionally posthumous—absurdities of the saga of John Patrick Ryan are here. This is a brilliantly constructed spy thriller, where Jack Ryan (Baldwin – could you imagine him, or for that matter Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, or Krasinski portraying Clancy’s latter-day Reaganesque fever dream of a President?) is the perpetually under-estimated smartest man in the room… or boat.

While I might say that the story ultimately halts more than it concludes, the trip to that anti-climax is engaging enough, and all of the people involved aren’t bringing to the proceedings the same baggage as the source material** that it’s extraordinarily difficult not to like the film, despite my steadily increasing antipathy for the character.

*Clancy sure knew his audience. I’ve got to give him that.

**To be fair, part of the film’s strength is that the direct source material is far and away Clancy’s strongest book. It came before he started to buy his own press.

Conan The Barbarian (1982)

Director: John Milius

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Earl Jones, Sandahl Bergman, Ben Davidson

Have I Seen it Before: I want to say yes, but the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that every memory I have of the movie is half remembered wisps from various partial viewings on cable throughout the years.

Did I Like It: This is an interesting border movie. Yes, it comes after the one-two-three punch of Jaws (1975), Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in an age where films were slowly going to become more about spectacle and never look back, and when films more about ideas like anything directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 

Conan somehow miraculously straddles the line between the two worlds. On the surface, it is a high fantasy epic with swordplay, mysticism, and action to spare. It made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name, which was no small feat as at that time all the Austrian Oak had to offer to the world of film was the documentary Pumping Iron (1977) and the sublimely, transcendently awful Hercules in New York (1969, AKA Hercules Goes Bananas). That alone would make it a staple of the action genre.

But there are ideas present here, thanks to the idiosyncratic hand of John Milius at the helm. It’s a deep dive into the Nietzschean ideal, and aside from an awkward title card as the first thing we see, it is all delivered subtly. It’s one of the most brashly atheist films ever conceived for a mainstream audience, with the film stopping for several scenes so that characters can debate about the value of their various arbitrary gods, only to then effectively dismiss their usefulness altogether. The third act hinges entirely on a mass cult meeting that unravels after their charismatic leader (Jones) is decapitated during a ceremony.

I’m not even sure I’m entirely on board with such slavish devotion to Nietzche, but the film could have been far more of a drag in its examination of those ideas. I’d imagine—and I’m basing this mostly off of a knowing viewing of The Big Lebowski (1998)—that I wouldn’t find Milus agreeable company, but one cannot deny that he made an imminently entertaining film that is steeped in his feelings about life and destiny. Star Wars might have had some ideas behind it as well, but I think we can all agree that there was a little bit more to the notion of selling action figures. No such luck here.