In a few quick brushstrokes, this opening stretch deftly establishes Ryan as a principled, well-rounded and decidedly bipartisan hero, an ideal protagonist for a new era of global, technological and financial unease. A decade later, Ryan is living in New York with Cathy and working as a Wall Street mole, covertly monitoring funds that might be linked to terrorist groups. As he recovers from his injuries, two key figures enter his life: Cathy ( Keira Knightley), a striking medical student with an irresistible tough-love approach to physical therapy and William Harper (Kevin Costner), a world-weary CIA veteran who sets up the promising young operative for a career in financial intelligence. and Russia, in light of the Edward Snowden affair, the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, and the Russian Foreign Ministry’s recent expulsion of American journalist David Satter.Ī handsome young American studying at the London School of Economics when 9/11 hits, John Patrick Ryan (Pine) is spurred into action and joins the Marines, subsequently enduring a baptism by fire when his helicopter is shot down over Afghanistan in 2003. At the same time, the film reactivates some fairly hoary spy-thriller cliches in a way that nonetheless eerily reflects the heightened friction between the U.S. International prospects also look solid for a franchise that has generally held its own overseas, although in almost all respects, “Jack Ryan: Shadow Reboot” - er, “Recruit” - has been conceived as a fresh departure from its predecessors, starting with a screenplay that can be considered original to the extent that it isn’t based on one of Clancy’s nine Ryan novels.Īs though acknowledging that the author’s bestselling procedurals hailed from an earlier chapter of geopolitical warfare, scribes David Koepp and Adam Cozad have effectively repositioned Ryan’s origin story in a post-9/11 context.
17 from its originally scheduled Christmas Day bow, the Paramount release should take advantage of a noncompetitive post-holiday frame, appealing to audiences eager for unchallenging, well-acted, not entirely mindless popcorn fare following a slew of December awards-season hopefuls. Stepping back into the spotlight just a few months after Tom Clancy’s death, the author’s famed CIA-analyst hero gets a spiffy new avatar but a fairly routine assignment in “ Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.” Crisp, efficient and appreciably modest in scale for a picture that imagines a Russian terrorist attack massive enough to upstage 9/11, this conspicuous attempt to breathe new life into a long-dormant action franchise gets at least a few things right, chiefly the shrewd casting of Chris Pine in a role enjoyably incarnated in the ’90s by Alec Baldwin (“The Hunt for Red October”) and Harrison Ford (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger”) before being left for dead by Ben Affleck in 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears.” But while it zips along divertingly enough and capably weaves together various topical threads involving renewed U.S.-Russia hostility and global economic instability, Kenneth Branagh’s latest helming effort ultimately feels assembled from too many recycled genre parts to achieve more than muffled impact in the end.
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