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.