Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

2014 is off a thoroughly unimpressive start with Hollywood’s first major release of the year, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. The film reboots Tom Clancy’s best-selling series about the titular CIA analyst for a post-911 era (which is now also a post-Edward-Snowden era, in which CIA heroes aren’t the easiest sell.) Ryan first hit the silver screen in the form of Alec Baldwin in John McTiernan's 1990 blockbuster The Hunt for Red October, which was the last of the great, script-driven, pre-CGI, Hollywood action thrillers. Harrison Ford took over the part in two less memorable films directed by Phillip Noyce, 1992’s Patriot Games and 1994’s Clear and Present Danger. Paramount Pictures then rebooted the franchise in 2002 with Ben Affleck as a younger Ryan but despite the success of Phil Alden Robinson's The Sum of All Fears, no further sequels appeared until now.

The new film, which is not an adaptation of a Clancy novel, presents a kind of origin story for Ryan, now played by Chris Pine (Captain Kirk of the new Star Trek films). Kevin Costner plays the older agent who recruits Ryan in to the CIA, Keira Knightle plays his lovely girlfriend who doesn’t know about his real job, and Kenneth Branagh (who also directs) plays the evil Russian heavy. Adam Cozad and David Koepp’s screenplay keeps the scope of the story a reasonably small size for this first adventure of the young character, and their suspenseful sequences would be highly effective if they didn’t rely so strongly on the villain being absurdly naïve and vain. Most of the film strains credibility, even for a popcorn picture, because Ryan is comes off as so much smarter than everyone else, even though he’s supposed to be a totally green field agent. Branagh, whose last film as a director was 2011’s woeful but financially successful Thor, seems to have made the leap from inventive little pictures to mega-budget Hollywood fair. Too bad he can’t do anything more with this material than make a barely serviceable spy movie.