Film Review | Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
I spy a new super-sleuth
Thriller writer Tom Clancy’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Jack Ryan, whose patriotism and sweat have produced four popular Hollywood films, returns for an origin story built out of fragments of the Cold War and the debris of 9/11. Recruited by Kevin Costner’s CIA operative, Chris Pine’s Ryan joins a Wall Street firm as an undercover financial analyst, keeping an eye on suspicious money movements. The enemy finally rears its head, not in Damascus but in Moscow, where a cirrhosis-stricken Russian businessman is planning a dastardly attack on the US.
Even the James Bond franchise has been forced to labour in the shadow of the Bourne trilogy, which was itself an edgy update of the America-in-peril films of the 1990s, so if Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit feels too familiar, it’s not entirely the movie’s fault. The screenplay has the usual mix of fast-footed action, ideology-driven villains, chase sequences and paeans to surveillance technology. Kenneth Branagh, who directs apart from starring as the crooked millionaire Cherevin, navigates smoothly between one scene and the next, using his actors well and counting down to the inevitable finale with efficiency rather than panache.
Jack Ryan released in theatres on Friday.
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