Clear and Present Danger
     
Director: Phillip Noyce
Year: 1994
Rating: 7.0
Jack Ryan is back for his third film and again starring Harrison Ford for the second time in a row. Harrison brings a certain boyish charm to the role. I have never read any of Clancy's books, so I have no idea if this or Patriot Games stuck very closely to them. I read that Clancy was very unhappy with how Patriot Games turned out. And the more I thought about it after watching it yesterday, the more banal it felt. I think I will have to lower my rating. There is really nothing to it. A man defends his family. Fine but for a Jack Ryan film? This one feels much more in line with what I expected. A vicious drug cartel, American military power and hubris, a political scandal that reaches to the top of the government and Ryan finding himself in the middle of it with only his principles to guide him. It makes for a fine narration that admittedly at 140 minutes was much too long. But it is stuffed with a number of sub-plots.

 

Ryan's mentor and boss Admiral Greer is in the hospital with terminal cancer and so Ryan is temporarily put in charge of the CIA. A moment though first to praise James Earl Jones who passed away yesterday. He and his voice have been a constant in our lives for decades. He always brought an authority to his roles - even silly ones like his in Conan the Barbarian. That I watched two films that he was in yesterday - one in which he dies - and checked to make sure the actor was still alive - he was at the time - only to read later that night that he died felt really weird. Anyways, you had a good run sir. RIP.

 

A good friend of the President (Donald Moffat) is found murdered on a yacht and it is attributed to a Columbian drug cartel. Ryan digs a bit into the man's past and finds vast ties and wealth connected to the drug trade.  The President orders his Chief of Staff Cutter (Harris Yulin) to hit back at the cartels - but secretly - Congress is not to know - nor Ryan. Cutter has an old hand in the area - Clark (William Dafoe) - organize a small military special service ops to go down and start killing the drug lords. Not something many Americans would mind happening today. They start blowing up shit and the cartel retaliates and nearly kills Ryan in a good shootout. Ryan finally figures out what is going on and he is put on the target list. By the Americans. My only issue with this is that Ryan has turned into a bureaucrat and even when he goes to face the cartel along with Clark, he doesn't take a gun. Come on. You are a Marine and you go in empty handed? This was directed by Phillip Noyce again after Patriot Games. The next Ryan film, The Sum of All Fears, was not for another eight years in 2002 and Ben Affleck takes on the role of Ryan.