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Clear and Present Danger
The third Jack Ryan outing sees Harrison Ford's CIA analyst playing politics and battling Columbian drug dealers. Action thriller co-starring Willem Dafoe
Flabby, overblown and pretentious, Jack Ryan's third cinematic outing (but only Ford's second in the role) very nearly killed off the franchise. It took radical surgery - with Ford being dropped in favour of Ben Affleck as a younger, more vigorous version of the CIA analyst in 2002's The Sum Of All Fears to save Tom Clancy's hero. So what went wrong here? For a kick-off, Clancy's sprawling plot about high-level politicking and the Central American drug trade moves with the speed and conviction of a drunk at closing time. Ryan - now bumped up the CIA chain of command to Deputy Director level - finds himself being sucked deeper and deeper into a convoluted cover-up following the assassination of a close friend of the President (Moffat). But it's all plot and talky counter-plot with very little character to give it meaning or action to counterbalance the dreariness of it all. When the action does finally come (don't bother waiting for character development though), it's too little and too late for it revitalise a dull flick. On the plus side, Ford is solidly heroic (if clearly too old for this stuff) and an impressive sum has been spent on the look of the film. If director Philip Noyce had spent time pruning down the script's meaningless complexities and pushing his actors (which include Dafoe as Clancy's tough CIA field agent Clark) beyond the basics, there's a chance that this could have been a satisfying grown-up thriller. Which makes the fact that it turned out as such a smug and lazy affair even more galling. Verdict Dull rather than dreadful. Ford and the more-than-respectable supporting cast do their best, but with Noyce's direction stuck firmly in snooze mode there's little they can do to kick the film into life. |
