Tom Clancy’s Harrison Ford
Patriot Games (1992), Directed by Philip Noyce
By Fearless Young Orphan
Well, crap. It’s not that Patriot Games is a bad movie. It is a fairly competent movie, really. Everyone involved seems to know what they are doing. There are many recognizable faces early in their careers (Samuel L. Jackson, among others). My honeypunkin (the Tom Clancy fan, remember) tells me that it is a pretty accurate (though extremely abridged) interpretation of the 500-ish page book. I can certainly feel the cuts that had to be made. My honeypunkin seemed to like it more than me (though he’s not in love with the film by any means) because he had read the background material, but I am of the mind that they cut out the wrong things. Or maybe the story just isn’t all that great to begin with. I don’t know.
Jack Ryan (now Harrison Ford) has quit being a CIA agent and is working as a professor at Annapolis. He, his surgeon wife Catherine (Anne Archer) and their daughter Sally (a teeny little Thora Birch) are in England on a working vacation. That Jack happens to run across English Royals being attacked by IRA terrorists is a complete coincidence, and I don’t like these kinds of coincidences in serious stories. Jack intervenes with his super CIA skills and gets himself shot in the shoulder, but manages to stop the family’s abduction. He also kills one of the Irish men, the 17-year-old little brother of IRA fanatic Sean Miller (Sean Bean). Sean Miller doesn’t take kindly to his baby brother being killed (his world view is fairly self-centered, you might say) and he vows revenge.
During the course of the film, Sean Miller will travel with his companions to a terrorist-training camp in Africa, but will also bookend The Ryan family vacations usually do end with bullets flying, even on that Disney cruise they took. this training with trips to Maryland on two separate occasions to inflict havoc and harm on the Ryan family. On his first trip, he launches an attack on Cathy and Sally that lands them both in the hospital. This is when Jack Ryan gets good and pissed off, rejoins the CIA and puts himself more or less in charge of the group that has been assigned to stop this particular IRA faction. Thanks to satellite imagery and a few rather surprisingly leaps of logic (bald heads and boobies and yet another coincidence: a red-headed ponytail making an appearance in a lady’s restroom where Jacks should really not have been), Jack sends choppers after the terrorist training camp where Sean Miller is hiding. A few satellite images of destruction later, Jack thinks the problems are solved. But of course movie-villain logic applies: if we, the audience, do not see the villain die, you can bet damn well sure that the villain is still alive.
The whole thing culminates on a dark and stormy night back in Maryland when the Ryans just so happen to have a grateful British Royal at their house for dinner. The IRA terrorists attack and make a big mess and cause a boat chase. If I were the guys in charge of the terrorists (Patrick Bergin and Polly Walker) I would have cut Sean Miller loose a long time ago. That guy was not playing for the team. I certainly would not have put him in the same room with Jack Ryan and the Royal they wanted to take hostage. But oh well, I guess that you can’t be picky when most of your group has been turned to ash in the middle of the African desert.
The surprising leaps of logic are less surprising if one reads the book, says my honeypunkin. But I haven’t read the book and as far as I was concerned, it seemed to me that Ryan was pulling ideas out of his ass. That slapdash method worked because his enemies were doing the same thing. Everybody is just stumbling across exactly the information they need to proceed with plans, and if you pause and think about any of it, the paths of their thinking make no sense with the scant information we are given.
Here’s an example: Sean Miller, a wanted man and a known terrorist, escapes England on a freighter. The next time we see him, he is sitting in a van outside of Sally Ryan’s private school in Maryland. Now, I personally would like to know the steps he took to put himself in such an opportune spot. My honeypunkin says the book covers this. The movie does not even bother. And this is by no means the only incident of this “plot leaping.”
To say that I didn’t like this Jack Ryan adventure anywhere near as much as Red October is obvious enough. As I was saying “I’m gonna Harrison-Ford the shit out of this to my honeypunkin, I mostly just movie!” wish that Alec Baldwin had been left in the Jack Ryan role. I thought he was great. I really liked that Jack Ryan. I would have hung out with him through coincidences and contrivances. This is not
girl-crush talk, either. This is girl-who-likes-a-compelling-character talk.
So let’s cut to the chase. The problem is Harrison Ford. No, no, not the man himself. He’s a cinematic icon and a pretty good actor and he was in Blade Runner so he and I are always gonna be good. My initial problem with his playing Jack Ryan was that he seemed at least a decade too old for the part. But upon reflection, that’s not it. His age isn’t the problem, it’s that he’s Harrison Ford. When Alec Baldwin plays Jack Ryan, I am watching a movie about Jack Ryan. When Harrison Ford plays Jack Ryan, I am watching a movie about Harrison Ford. This could have just as easily been a prequel to Air Force One. Show me this movie without mentioning Tom Clancy or the name Jack Ryan, and I’d never know it was supposed to be the same guy as the Red October hero. Believe me, I completely understand the box office draw of putting Harrison Ford in a movie. But it’s a shame because I think the series suffered as a result of the guy’s being too big a star for the part.
Add to that the lengthy slog of the story, which cuts out all the interesting details of the espionage on both sides, and we’ve lost the magic. Red October did not present this problem to me. First, in that movie, someone besides Jack Ryan was allowed to have a brilliant idea, and second, we were taken through the steps of how each puzzle piece was assembled by the capable characters. Imagine that movie, if nobody had ever mentioned how the Dallas managed to find the Red October. Still good? Maybe. As good as it was? Not even close.
We’ll do Clear and Present Danger next. I’ve already vented my spleen (oh, sorry, Sally!) about my major issues with Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan, so maybe I’ll do better with the next one. On the other hand, I’ve seen it before and remember almost nothing about it, so that’s not a very good sign.