Without Remorse
Yet another victim of current events, this plot is absolutely mad. It was bad enough after the first Trump presidency, but after the second one, is just crazy. Why do even serious action films have to ape Marvel with shared universes, and post-credits scenes? Just do regular sequels, no need to tease so much!
Think about it. Guy Pearce would be Pete Hegseth, a drunkard that makes Yeltsin seem like a productive member of society. The president would be Biden, or Trump, not sure who would be worse to present a Rainbow Six idea. The female CIA head would be Gina Haspel, a torture black site head, promoted by Trump and retained by Biden. Just replacing one of those characters is enough to turn this into Burn After Reading.
This could just as well be a prequel to Jack Reacher, almost. This is a family man who thinks he’s getting fucked by the spooks, but it turns out to be getting fucked by an even greater scope villain. It’s the unnamed system, a faceless entity of bad guys running the show since Smedley Butler did the “War is a Racket” speech.
The spook appeared to be part of the bad guys but wasn’t, the Russian dude was also a pawn in the system, the Secretary of Defense was a leader. That evil enterprise needed some efficiency, there’s a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Anyhow, our hero didn’t die when a bunch of GRU assassins murdered several American SEAL on US soil. The president and everyone else is content to let this slide, this is truly prescient. After the failed assassination attempt, Hegseth sends the hero to Russia in a Howard Hughes-style covert flight. I though it was a Boeing plane, since they were supposed to HALO out of there. But the Russians are warned and blow it up.
Getting shot down doesn’t stop the mission, they work it out. It’s no big deal to get to the place to kidnap the Russian dude that was apparently a CIA agent. Against all odds, and with dozens of Russian cops, SWAT dudes, and also some civilians, our hero makes it back! As all are friends, he goes off the grid, pretends to be dead. It’s all offscreen, this Enemy of the State getaway.
After warning Hegseth and noticing he knows things he shouldn’t, he kidnaps him from a fancy restaurant (offscreen), records his confession, and dumps him in the Potomac. There’s even another offscreen Three Days of the Condor scene where the confession leaks to the press and he is called a traitor by a newscaster. Our hero is saved by his boss (semi-offscreen, there’s a reveal later).
Thinking about this film, there’s a lot of offscreen plot developments. The on screen stuff is reserved for hardcore action set pieces with fancy practical effects, and some character development at the start. It’s all matter of fact shootouts, more Heat than John Wick.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.