The Ryan Initiative

For an American film, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is an unusually disillusioning experience. Before this new Jack Ryan, I ranked Koepp and Zaillian among today’s top screenwriters and I believed Branagh to be a very competent director of intelligent films. However, their combined effort is an example of the worst kind of sloppiness in screenwriting and directing. Though the screenplay holds together in rough outlines (the circular narrative structure, the satisfactory interconnection of the relationship and work storylines, the economical use of props), the individual scenes reveal the confounding laziness of the film’s creators in figuring out how to make a particular character do a particular thing. The number of supporting constructs that they place in front of us due to poorly thought-out situations and the obtuse behaviour of the characters grows exponentially and one long, uninterrupted facepalm is the only appropriate reaction to the final twenty minutes, when everyone suddenly displays miraculous prescience and the ability to be in the right place at the right time. With the exception of the raw hotel brawl, which keeps alive the hope that this could be a decent paranoid thriller in the vein of late Hitchcock, the action scenes are muddled and mediocre. Shifting attention from the directing and screenplay to the actors is a matter of stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the characters are interchangeable and played by actors who lack charisma. The dual (or even triple?) exposition only seems to indicate that this could be the hero’s origin story. As a result, the return to the past is not used for the purpose of tracking the longer-term development of the protagonist, who doesn’t actually develop (on the contrary, Pine’s facial expression at the end is one of even greater surprise than it was at the beginning), but serves primarily to amplify the pro-American emphasis of the narrative: we must defend our territory, values and – mainly – our money. Similarly, it initially seems that Ryan will be differentiated from other action heroes by his use of intellect instead of muscle (though Pine’s acting style is absolutely incompatible with such a concept), but someone else comes up with the main and, incidentally, rather dumb infiltration action and all of the shifts in the narrative are resolved through physical force and not by means of data collection and analysis. In the end, Ryan appears to be the more intelligent character, mainly thanks to the fact that he is surrounded by idiots who are unable to plan an operation that’s not based largely on chance. Nor is the ensemble given much strength by Branagh himself, whose tenacious Russian patriot with liver spots and a light bulb would be better suited to a Cold War-era Bond movie. Those Bond films, though, didn’t lack a sense of detached humour, the utter absence of which definitively kills Jack Ryan, which itself is an offence against spy thrillers and their viewers. Because of its cheapness (not in terms of budget, but in everything else), this is a film that’s suitable only as a Movie of the Week (or whatever they call it these days) on broadcast TV. 50% (27/01/2014) (moins) (plus)