"Patriot Games" is...the kind of Hollywood product that reeks of banal commercialism.
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"Patriot Games" was a considerable step back for the Jack Ryan series after the engrossing "The Hunt for Red October". For starters, Harrison Ford brought nothing dynamic to the role. With the exception of Han Solo and Indiana Jones, Ford plays every character as a "confused middle-aged man". I´m not asking Ford to display a great emotional range in every movie, but a little variation would make him more palatable to me than he is now. Also, how many times do we have to look at him doing his "huff-and-puff" run? "Patriot Games" begins with Ford huffing-and-puffing in slow motion as he runs towards his family across a town square. He huffs-and-puffs in slo-mo yet again in "Clear and Present Danger". He did everybody a favor by not huffing-and-puffing in "The Sum of All Fears".
In "Patriot Games", the Ryan family visits London so that Jack (Ford) can deliver a guest lecture to members of the British military. While the Ryans are sightseeing, Irish terrorists attempt to kidnap a member of the royal family. Jack Ryan gets involved in the melee, and he single-handedly disrupts the terrorists´ plans. Ryan kills a young man and apprehends his older brother, Sean Miller (Sean Bean). Jack gets knighted for his services to the British royal family, and Sean Miller hisses at Jack in a British court of law. Sean Miller´s cohorts spring him from the hands of British law enforcement officials, and the Irish terrorists (not affiliated with the Irish Republican Army) go to North Africa in order to train for another kidnapping attempt. Of course, Sean Miller puts his buddies´ plans in jeopardy when he continues to pursue the Ryan family rather than focusing on nabbing the desired hostage.
I haven´t read Tom Clancy´s source novel (of his books, I´ve only read "The Hunt for Red October), so I don´t know what changes were made to the narrative during the screenwriting process. However, the final movie presents a simplistic, by-the-test-screening-numbers story that marches towards a showdown between Jack Ryan and Sean Miller without a sense of grace, dignity, or skill. Many movies feature inevitable confrontations between protagonists and antagonists, but "Patriot Games" gives us two characters that fight each other almost for the sake of fighting. When asked why he charged right into the terrorists´ first kidnapping attempt, Jack Ryan merely states that he was angry about the situation. Okay, so his blood got a little up...what about his sense of duty as a former Marine? What about the fact that he´s a family man and an intelligence analyst rather than an out-and-out physical warrior? Did Ryan just forget that he´s supposed to hate getting involved in situations that remove him from the comfort of his routine?
"Patriot Games" is also the kind of Hollywood product that reeks of banal commercialism. Here we have a story that involves terrorists hounding a family to the ends of the earth. The terrorists nearly succeed in brutally murdering a little girl (Ryan´s daughter, played by Thora Birch). Right after a nasty showdown between the hero and his enemy, the movie cuts to a coy sequence in which Catherine Ryan (Anne Archer) doesn´t reveal the sex of the baby growing inside of her (the idea being that you have to read Clancy´s tomes or see the movie sequel in order to discover the details). We go from ugly violence to a bad case of the cutes within a matter of minutes, as if the filmmakers wanted to make audiences feel good about watching a rather downbeat and grim movie. This is the sort of pandering that erases any credibility that a film may have built with me as a discerning viewer.
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