Anamorphia

If the last decade of big-budget filmmaking has taught us anything, it’s that if your franchise is in trouble (or simply laying dormant and the rights are due to expire), head back to square one. Batman; Spider-Man; Bond; Star Trek… get it right, and the public will cease their ‘not another reboot/origin story’ eye rolling and all will be forgiven.

So with that in mind, the latest attempt at franchise defibrillation is Tom Clancy’s beloved C.I.A. analyst-turned-field agent Jack Ryan. This is Paramount’s fifth outing for the gifted operative (after THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, PATRIOT GAMES, CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER and THE SUM OF ALL FEARS), and the first not based on one of the late Mr. Clancy’s books, but a complete resetting of the Ryan character into a post-9/11 world.

This in itself isn’t a bad idea – the world of espionage (even pre-Edward Snowden/N.S.A. scandal, which in fairness broke after the wheels for SHADOW RECRUIT were well in motion) has never been more fertile for movies, as the web of lies, allegiance and betrayal gets ever more complex and tantalising for fiction.

It feels all the stranger then, that David Koepp and Adam Cozad’s screenplay is constantly trying to retrofit SHADOW RECRUIT to the template of the long-extinct Cold War era of Jack Ryan 1.0. The villainous plot is spearheaded by Viktor Cheverin (Kenneth Branagh, who also directs when he's tired of chewing the scenery), a Russian high financier with ties to the Kremlin (of course) and who is hell-bent on destroying the US economy via a cunningly-timed terrorist attack.

Which brings us to SHADOW RECRUIT’s biggest weakness: its politics are really, really dumb.  Not hateful or offensive - just dumb, in two particularly major ways:

First, it wants us to believe that political ideology trumps personal - or at the very least, corporate - greed. Cheverin practically glows with hatred for the US, (although besides some cursory mention of taking flak from an American grenade during his tour of the Russian war in Afghanistan, we’re never sure quite why), and longs with a positively Chekhovian melancholy to restore Mother Russia to her former glory – I take it this inferred glory is the pre-USSR Russian Empire, because my reading of Soviet History is that most people didn’t really dig it – hence all those folks pulling the Berlin Wall apart with their bare hands the minute they weren’t going to get shot for trying. My point is, this is the exact inverse of how we now know the super-rich work, regardless of where they are from: free market capitalists out doing it for the glory of their nation of birth? Tell that to Rupert Murdoch. A billionaire taking orders from a politician? Pull the other one – it’s owned by the Koch brothers; You find me a multi-billionaire who gives a shit about borders and patriotism, and I’ll sit you down and tell you a story.

Secondly, the filmmakers cherry-pick their history. Jack exists pretty much as a direct result of 9/11, and yet in a 2013 where the Global Financial Crisis hasn’t happened – indeed, he’s spent ten years undercover as an economic analyst for the C.I.A. working ON FUCKING WALL STREET! Nice work, Jack! Way to see that market crash coming and save the day! As if that weren’t enough, halfway through the film he explains in the simplest possible terms the worst outcome for Cheverin’s plan: that *gasp!* the US could be plunged into a second Great Depression! And exactly what do you think most of America has been struggling through since 2010, Mr. Ryan? How about you take a trip to say, Detroit? Or even closer, to Schenectady in your home state of New York, instead of permanently surrounding yourself with Wall Street pinstriped wankers?! It’s such a glaringly stupid error, and one that could have been fixed by changing a single line in the screenplay.

There are other niggles, too: Jack has a chronic back injury, which we are frequently asked to forget, but that's difficult when Branagh and co. have made such a big deal of it in the first act. In the first half of the movie (by far its strongest), Jack is a believably exceptional analyst. In the second half, he makes the lightning fast leap to being a super spy, finding a terrorist cell in real time from a plane 40,000ft. in the air. In the big climactic fight/chase, Jack makes a bizarre, Sterling Archer-esque choice (purely for the sake of upping the action, but still...) They're minor distractions at the time, but they certainly begin to add up.

However - despite my ranting up to this point, it's not all bad. It’s well shot and cut, the action sequences are slick and the performances (despite what they sometimes have to work with) are all fine. Pine again proves highly adept in the young-hero-coming-of-age role, Costner is playing Jack's mentor as a man with plenty to hide (which bodes well for the future), and Keira Knightly does well in a largely thankless role.

This is a story that would be much better served set in 1983 rather than 2013, but it has its moments. Maybe in a post-Bourne and SKYFALL world, you could argue that it doesn’t quite have enough of them, but there’s just enough to hope for a much improved follow-up.

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is released on January 16th in the US, Australia and New Zealand, and on January 24th in the UK.