After thwarting an assassination attempt, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) finds himself and his family a target of the assassins.
The Jack Ryan franchise is such a weird beast, particularly with hindsight. Four movies with largely different casts and production teams, yet all vaguely tied together by the property.
Where Red October feels like a highbrow version of an eighties high concept thriller, Patriot Games is a markedly different beast.
It and its follow up, Clear and Present Danger, form the one coherent thread in the series. Red October pitched Alec Baldwin’s Ryan as a fresh-faced and green, a second banana to the star power of Sean Connery, Patriot Games is re-centred around Ryan as a middle-aged family man, the perfect avatar for new star (in both story and commercial terms) Harrison Ford.
Ford is an incredibly easy person to latch onto. He has an Everyman quality that makes his ecru action and line reading feel totally natural. Crucially for this entry, he has great chemistry with onscreen spouse Anne Archer (Cathy).
The film is also more concerned with Ryan’s family life. From the opening, in which we are introduced to the Ryan family home, the filmmakers reboot the fledgling franchise with no bumps.
Patriot Games is a distinctly smaller and more intimate film than the films either side of it, and its best moments are often smaller, and more character-based: Ryan’s daughter trying to say thank you but getting interrupted by the royal’s endless monologue; Robby (Samuel L. Jackson) presenting Ryan with a fake award; even the cutaway at the end.
In contrast to most thrillers, the film has an interesting relationship with violence - it is rarely exhilarating.
The assassination attempt on Ryan and his wife is scary and the second act is the family recovering from trauma.
The raid on the terrorist compound is filmed from a remove, shown on an infrared camera. There is something discomfiting about this distance, particularly the one wounded guy trying to drag himself away.
This approach is fascinating, particularly since the film is trying to wrestle with ideas of personal vengeance and state violence.
It makes the finale feel like more of a cop-out: it is tense but the shift into the final fight on the boat feels a generic action beat.
There is something off about the film’s structure: we juggle between Ryan and Sean’s (Sean Bean) perspectives through the initial ambush.
But then our villain disappears.
The film suffers from having two antagonists, Sean and his cell leader Kevin (Patrick Bergen). One would think the filmmakers would have just combined the characters into one.
Of all the original Jack Ryan movies, Patriot Games has never ranked particularly high for me. It features fine performances and some great scenes (my favourite scene is Sean’s prison break, shot from inside the prison van), but there is something missing from the story.
There is a tension between the film’s willingness to engage in the reality of contemporary conflict, and function as a traditional Hollywood thriller.
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