Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Jack Ryan, as a young covert CIA analyst, uncovers a Russian plot to crash the U.S. economy with a terrorist attack.
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5 films that influenced Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
What critics say influenced Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
From there, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit settles into a familiar espionage-flick groove, borrowing from both its predecessors and also the Bond franchise (Ryan’s shell-shocked reaction to his first kill as an operative blatantly recalls Daniel Craig’s ambivalence at the beginning of Casino Royale.
If Casino Royale merits five stars and The Bourne Supremacy four, then Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit deserves no more than three.
What remains undecided at this point is whether or not this fifth Ryan production will represent a Casino Royale -style reboot for the franchise.
And that’s been a rocky run as it was, starting with Alec Baldwin in “The Hunt for Red October,” who passed the baton to Harrison Ford in “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.”
You’d have to go all the way back to 1990’s The Hunt For Red October, starring a then-ascendant Alec Baldwin, to find a Jack Ryan film that really holds up.
With “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” this character, drawn from the late Tom Clancy’s novels, has now been played by four actors since 1990’s “The Hunt for Red October.”
This time, the young-again title character, adeptly played by Chris Pine , does not come from a Tom Clancy novel, as he did in four other films when Ryan looked a lot like Alec Baldwin ("The Hunt for Red October"), then Harrison Ford ("Patriot Games," "Clear and Present Danger") and Ben Affleck ("The Sum of All Fears").
Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst hero has been played, with varying results, by Alec Baldwin in “The Hunt for Red October,” Harrison Ford in “Clear and Present Danger” and “Patriot Games,” and Ben Affleck in “The Sum of All Fears.”
I suppose that if I had never seen or forgotten the plots of films like "Running Scared," "Tango and Cash," and "Rush Hour" — like my son Grant, who loved this movie — then I would have thought that this Ice Cube-Kevin Hart feature was ground-breaking and hysterical instead of tired and lazy.
Kate Beckinsale – who we all love in the “Underworld” films and truly understands the action-star business – was too cool to take on the role of Jack Ryan’s main squeeze Cathy.
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Also memorable: as deadly Michigan-based sleeper agent Aleksandr Borovsky, Alec Utgoff (2010's " The Tourist ") is viciously no-nonsense, standing out with little screen time and almost no dialogue.