Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

The best moment in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” released in 2014, lets the director and important supporting actor Kenneth Branagh to put cars and guns away for a short, unblinking stare for a scene of two people at a dinner table. Branagh plays a heroin-addicted Russian terrorist in this franchise reboot, and when he’s at dinner in Moscow with Ryan’s fiancée, played by Keira Knightley, he’s being tricked into believing he’s making good progress in the crying-seduction department.

Then he gets a text saying it’s a setup. Chris Pine plays the CIA analyst played in previous films by Alec Baldwin, Harrison For and Ben Affleck, and Pine’s Ryan is searching the terrorist’s files digitally in another location while putting his fiancée in danger. (That old story development again.) Michael Phillips said in his review, “Once he learns of the deception, Branagh fixes Knightley with his best, cruelest, tightest-lipped Laurence Olivier stare. And because Branagh is directing the scene as well as playing in it, he allows the camera to take an extra second or two to register the moment, before getting back to the workmanlike film at hand.”

Phillips noted, “"Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" has plenty of action, almost all of it staged and edited in the manner of a Paul Greengrass "Bourne" movie (hand-held frenzy, without the Greengrass spatial clarity).” This is a Jack Ryan prequel, introducing the future analyst as an American graduate student at the London School of Economics, wanting to serve as a Marine once 9/11 changes the world forever. Two years later his helicopter is shot down over Afghanistan. In rehab at Walter Reed medical center back home, he meets the doctor (Phillips noted, “Knightley, doing her flattest, nowhere-in-particular American dialect”) who helps him look like an action star for the rest of the film.

In the climax of the film during the Moscow part is the best. Kevin Costner gets comfortable as a scruffy superior authority as Ryan’s supervisor, who always defends Ryan. Phillips mentioned, “Frustratingly, though, the screenplay by Adam Cozad and David Koepp devolves into scenes of Ryan solving a ridiculous number of riddles in record time while tracking a different, related terrorist and thwarting a heinous attack on our home soil.”

Phillips continued, “The action climax, a mess of vehicular near-homicides and hand-to-hand brutalities, reminds you that Branagh (though he did well enough with the first "Thor" picture) hasn't much facility for high-velocity violence. He's more into the quiet, nasty bits. "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit," well acted up and down, feels caught halfway between being an idiotic spy picture for adolescents, and a reasonably grown-up thriller for reasonably grown-up grown-ups.” The latter isn’t the target audience for the decent franchise reboot. However, that’s what the film basically is: a decent franchise reboot.

Like I had already mentioned last week, the last two films in the franchise really killed the franchise. I don’t see the need to keep making more sequels in the franchise, seeing how it should have ended strong. As you might have guessed, I don’t really recommend this one, seeing how I found it ok, but in all honesty, this is easily the worst in the franchise. Once you see it, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Thank you everyone for joining in for “Jack Ryan Month.” I hope everyone enjoyed my reviews. Stay tuned next month to see what I will review next.