Movie Review: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit: Avoid It

Well I recently saw this movie and I was kind of wishing it was as good a reboot as The Bourne Legacy was for that franchise. This movie was very forgettable but had some decent action scenes but is not even close to the 90s Jack Ryan movies. The plot was ludicrous to the point of laughablity and the acting was subpar for the most part. I kind of wished I saw something else or even saw Lone Survivor again.

The movie starts off as Jack Ryan is studying economics at the London School of Economics. He sees a news program about 9/11 and off he goes into the Marines. He gets shot down in a pretty exciting scene and we are told that he saves the people on his doomed helicopter. It would have nice to see the actual heroics but I guess it would have been too Lone Survivor-ish.

He then goes to Walter Reed Hospital to mend his broken back. While there he meets Keira Knightley who plays a nursing student at the hospital. He shows how much he likes her but the two actors don't have boffo chemistry like other movie parings like Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. It isn't the worst I have seen (Attack of the Clones ugh) but the romance brought nothing to the movie.

We then go on to meet Kevin Costner who is a pale shadow of the character that James Earl Jones played in the other Jack Ryan movies of the 90s. I think it is all the smirking and dead-pan voice but I guess I am just not a Costner fan. I think the only movies I have seen him (that I remember) were JFK and Man of Steel. He was okay in them but he didn't bring anything special to those roles or this one either. He just seems like a mirth-less asshole in any movie he is in.

One thing I was thinking was I wonder if people will get confused between this movie and Three Days to Kill. It is Kevin Costner playing a spy and things blow up. This one is about the same sort of idea but Chris Pine is the guy that makes things blow up. I was thinking Three Days to Kill is the Liam Neeson movie that might make Costner into the 50-something bad-ass that kills a bunch of people and saves his daughter/wife/family pet. However, Neeson is likeable and you want him to rescue his daughter. If Costner is shot in the first 3 minutes of the movie I wouldn't have minded.

In any case Ryan is sent to Russia and matches wits with Kenneth Branagh who plays a Russian oligarch/gangster. He pretty much hams it up with a terrible Russian accent and does things like shoots his own lackeys when they talk trash to him. There are about a 100 different bad-guys that would have been more intimidating than Branagh was in this role. I think we are spoiled with villains like Moriarty (Andrew Scott) from Sherlock or Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) from Game of Thrones. Those villains would eat Viktor Cherevin (I didn't even remember his name and had to look it up on IMDB) as an appetizer.

In any case Branagh has some cock-a-Mame plan to "crash the worlds debt markets" using a terrorist attack on Wall Street. So we have to go through a tiresome procedural to catch the villain.  In the course of it we have a Mission Impossible-style break in that was so tech-poor I laughed out-loud. Jack Ryan hacks Branagh's laptop and we have this scene of Ryan trying to download a bunch of files to a thumbdrive that he waits to insert until the last possible moment. Um, if you are going to be downloading a bunch of files from the office of the scary Russian mobster maybe you should connect your USB device first?

In any case the plan to "crash the US treasury market" was so stupid that I had to laugh again. Even if Wall Street was leveled using some strange explosive underground, or something, the markets would be immediately closed. Selling billions of dollars of treasuries all at once (the Russian badguys plans) would trigger curbs immediately. Even if those trades were triggered the SEC would probably notice that some Russian company was dumping treasuries to profit from a terrorist attack and reverse those trades. The whole exercise would have caused a plunge but it would not have "crashed the US markets" for longer than a few months.

In any case I have said too much about this poor movie then needed to be said. It was lame-brained and the plot was a mess from the scene where the villains son waits until the last moment to steal and paint a truck (he couldn't have just bought the thing months ago?) to the villains finding the CIA safe house in record time. However, it was interesting to find out that the KGB used to break a light bulb in a persons mouth as a torture technique. I'm sure Vladimir Putin approves of such measures and smiled as if recalling good times.