![]() The new movie is at its best in its first 20 minutes, which bespeak a ticklish sense of pacing. The shedding of cultural aspirations has lent his filmmaking buoyancy: his Hamlet was fussy and overwrought, but his Thor was clean and confident – pop Wagner. ![]() The director is Kenneth Branagh, whose makeover from cinema's foremost interpreter of Shakespeare into one of the more reliable reinterpreters of American pop icons is one of the more pleasing twists of recent years. Costner looks interestingly fatigued, like he's been lurking in a CIA drawer ever since 1987's No Way Out. Not least among those is Costner himself, who makes a habit of popping up in shadowy doorways to point Ryan towards his next major plot point. OK, so it's not Paul Newman took five minutes to kill Gromek in a gas stove during Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, but it's a start: a small sign that the director of this sleek franchise reboot, in addition to pilfering Bourne and the more recent Bonds, wishes to mix in a few more old-school pleasures as well. It's been a while since I felt that kind of mortal dread in a movie. "In this much water", Jack later recounts in rattled tones to his CIA boss Harper (Kevin Costner), who looks at Ryan's still shaking hand and tells him, "better after than during". The brawl ends with Ryan drowning his assailant in the bathtub. What follows is a Bourne-ish kinetic thrashabout – sinks are smashed, porcelain shattered, doors splintered. CIA analyst Jack (Chris Pine) has just been picked up from Moscow airport by his driver, a big Ugandan who drives him to his hotel, helps him carry his bags to his room, then calmly turns, unholsters a pistol and starts firing. Hardly earth-shattering, then, but efficient and entertaining nonetheless.T he best scene in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit shows someone's first murder. Can Jack hack the Russian computers before Viktor hacks Jack's girlfriend Cathy (Keira Knightley, holding her own against the boys – and an American accent – with ease)? The film may be formulaic, but Branagh handles the direction with clean, brisk, strokes the central office-break setpiece is nicely nail-biting stuff, with the three leads playing cat and mouse to a tee, while Kevin Costner fires off a few old-school rounds from the balcony. Spying a market irregularity, he heads to Russia where creepy Viktor Cherevin (director Kenneth Branagh, relishing his villainous role) is planning to wreak havoc on Wall Street. Which is bad news for the studio, but good news for those of us antiquated farts who quite like the idea of an old-fashioned cold war-inflected movie, albeit one with a modern online finance twist.Īfter recovering from a post-9/11 war wound, economist Jack Ryan is recruited by the CIA to keep a covert eye on sinister financial transactions. It was assumed that Pine would bring viewers too young to remember The Hunt for Red October or Patriot Games into the Ryan fold, but in America this series reboot has "skewed old", with more than a third of its opening weekend audience aged over 50. Over the course of five films, he's been variously played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford (twice), Ben Affleck, and now Chris Pine, recently seen piloting the Starship Enterprise through JJ Abrams's teen-friendly galaxy. ![]() It's been more than 20 years since novelist Tom Clancy's super-spook Jack Ryan first made it into the movies, and over a decade since he last appeared on screen.
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