Patriot Games
Just a bog standard Blob propaganda piece, but very much focused on Jack Ryan himself, not much political stuff surrounding it. He’s a family man now, apparently.
Our first family is “vacationing” in London for some Five Eyes conference, when our boy Ryan stops Irish terrorists from killing some royal cousin or something, some of those BS “roles”. One of the terrorists survives and vows revenge, until death.
Since this is an American film, British intelligence is absolutely incompetent, and terrorist friends break him out of the cellular van, and leave the country. This means Ryan has a target on his back, even though he lives in Maryland, Blob-land par-excellence.
Turns out the group that tried and failed to kill some royal cousin is an IRA splinter group, some kind of Provisional IRA? Their first attack is killing other IRA faction, including honey traps.
Anyway, Ryan is in Blob-land, but those guys can still nearly kill him just outside a military base, and run his wife and kid off the road. It’s her fault for driving a kid in a Porsche, instead of using a Volvo. The woman lives, but this spooks Ryan in getting back to work in Langley.
He uses his rusted analyst skills to guide Ted Raimi to check some satellite pics. The script is ludicrous, includes these gems: “Can you enhance that, sharpen that a little”, says Deckard, referencing Blade Runner. “Tits!”
He manages to identify the correct camp, and they send the black helicopters. This is pre-2001, there are no drones yet, or at least they were classified. No weddings are bombed, the intel is good this time.
Alas, they did not get there in time, the terrorists are already in America. The royal dude visited Ryan at his home for saving his life, with massive security, but it’s all for nought, the terrorists overcome all that.
For a splinter group without access to American resources, they manage to train in Libya, can access helicopters, and mount an operation in Maryland from the Libyan desert, involving night vision goggle and shit. Move over, Seal Team 6, the Pentagon is wasting all that money in nothing, everyone can project power overseas, no biggie.
But Ryan is there to provide security, as his boss Samuel L. Jackson. The royal secretary was the mole, but the security people were feds and state troopers, were they infiltrated too? The revengeful Sean Bean goes berserk, kills his allies, and chases Ryan in a speedboat. They struggle, and the boat blows up. Ryan is picked up, he’s off the CIA for good. At least until the next book.
The fucking Scots-Irish heritage strikes again. Bloody Catholics!
Apparently in the book, they want to kill Prince Charles. That makes much more sense, what kind of idiot cares about some royal cousin? What’s this, The Windsors?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.