It’s easy to make excuses for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, but it won’t make the movie any better. The fifth film in the American espionage series has a much lower budget than the typical Hollywood blockbuster, resulting in a much smaller film that confines most of the action to office buildings, a restaurant and a hotel room. But the scale isn’t the problem. It’s also the first film in the franchise that didn’t spring directly from a popular novel by Tom Clancy, but it’s not like no one else can write a capable spy thriller. While anyone with an affection for the adventures of Clancy’s CIA analyst-turned-hero could probably come up with reasons to forgive Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit for being such a trifling bore, there is probably no denying that it’s the worst Jack Ryan movie yet, excuses be damned.
So what happened? Everyone involved has done excellent work before, from a director proficient in epics, entertainments and epic entertainments (Hamlet, Dead Again, Thor), to an impressive cast consisting of grizzled veterans, a charismatic leading lady and a star who, well, fair enough, seems a little miscast as a nerd. Chris Pine has the boy scout quality down pat, and does a fair job of simultaneously looking out of his element and ready for a fight, but he struggles with Jack Ryan’s speeches about global economics and high-tech computer security. He knows how to say the words, he just can’t make us believe he actually knows what they mean, and a film as talky as Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit desperately needs audiences to believe that the characters understand the dense shoptalk, because all that really matters to audiences is that those big words motivate all the characters to do something interesting.
It could have happened. When you boil it down to its elements, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit has a refreshingly straightforward story. Jack Ryan is a CIA analyst working undercover on Wall Street, hiding his identity from his wife (Keira Knightley). He uncovers a mysterious MacGuffin file that sends him all the way to Russia, where a villainous villain plots the collapse of the American economy. Jack Ryan is forced to fight for his life, and matters get a little complicated when his wife shows up at his hotel to surprise him, only to get embroiled in the espionage herself.
There could have been a nostalgic simplicity to that plot, which relies more on deception and sneakery than on typical, brainless action. Too bad then that the dialogue lacks subtlety or wit, and that the emotional core is left to academia. Director Kenneth Branagh seems to understand that at the center of his tale is a romantic relationship based on lies, and that suspense should probably stem from whether or not one lover will learn the other’s secrets. But instead of telling the story in such a way that spotlights all that classy suspense, he relies on offhanded references to marital deceit films like Rosemary’s Baby and Sorry, Wrong Number to remind audiences of the emotional nucleus of his own movie. Even then, the references are askew, since hiding a secretly heroic job at the CIA is a far cry from plotting clandestine Satanic rites or wife-icide.
When the action finally does show its disinterested face, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit seems content to crib from Die Hard with a Vengeance and Casino Royale rather than do something, anything to distinguish itself from other, better action movies past. Even if you were somehow involved in the low-key teleplay subterfuge that takes up the bulk of the film, you’re bound to be disappointed when the stunt heavy finale confuses the previously noted existence of motorcycles for canny foreshadowing.
There’s an intimacy to the story that could have made Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit an intriguingly focused, low-key thriller in the smartest sense of the word, but the passion is absent, the threats stereotypical, and ultimately the film feels shallow where it could have been rather deep. A simple story needs to be bolstered by complex characters and genuine suspense to feel like a real movie, let alone a corking espionage thriller, and Jack Ryan seems content to stick to its archetypical clichés. They didn’t just reduce the franchise’s scale, they reduced the thrills and dumbed down the plot and characters, leaving Kenneth Branagh’s movie feeling like a subpar network TV pilot when it should have felt like a worthy motion picture: worthy of audiences’ time, and worthy of the impressive collection of intelligent spy movies that preceded it in the otherwise impressive Jack Ryan franchise.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
