Clear and Present Danger
John Milius adapts a Tom Clancy novel. His influence cannot be so big, if the coast guard captain is a woman in the opening credits. No one drinks deer blood either.
This is a weird mix of Iran-Contras and Bay of Pigs, but there’s a lot of trademark Milius political rants, it’s very boring. The hero lectures the president on the freaking Oval Office! It’s the classic fascist argument about politicians stabbing soldiers in the back…
If Ryan is ranting at the president, it doesn’t make much sense to yell at Reagan or Bush Sr. The head of the CIA being a careerist slimeball is also weird, wasn’t that Bush Sr? That part seems mostly about JFK, so Dulles, relitigating something 30 years later. Absolutely wild to attack Dulles from the right, but that tracks for Walter Sobchak.
Evil drug dealers are flooding America with drugs, and one of the kingpin is Pablo Escobar, I mean, Ernesto Escobendo or some stupid name. Escobar himself seems like a playboy/family man/murderous psycho, his evilness is apparent by hiring a former Fidel Castro fixer.
One of Escobar’s money launderer is fucking him over, so he just sends dudes to murder his whole family in a yacht and dump their bodies overboard (yes, The Bourne Identity). The problem is that the human HSBC is a personal friend of the president, so he uses all state resources to investigate this, including roping in the CIA, which includes Ryan.
This is a plot hole, because in Patriot Games, his wife was giving him grief over his dangerous work, buy this time, there’s no time to write about his family at all. They are completely sidelined, even the breakfast scene is just a copy. John Milius doesn’t care about female people.
The president is so enraged, he whispers to his National Security Adviser to start a war, but doesn’t really tell them directly, for plausible deniability.
Anyway, that former Castro adviser is fucking some middle aged woman who happens to be the secretary to the head of the FBI, so he’s got the inside information. He’s the actual man behind the curtain, the head honcho.
After some shootout where the head of the FBI is killed by bandits and Ryan, the desk job guy, miraculously survives, his boss Darth Vader gets worse and dies, which means his job is now on the White House, instead of Langley.
Ryan discovers the other slimeballs, including the president, are illegally conspiring with the Castro adviser to start a cartel war and kill Escobar. This is another plot hole, why does he need to kill the secretary, if he’s a CIA asset?
Ryan, a CIA higher up, interfering with a legitimate black op, just because Congress wasn’t informed. This is yet another stupid plot point, on the other films Congress is just a bunch of stupid cads and the Blob knows best, but this is the opposite.
There is still time for another Colombian shootout, Ryan is trying to save the random dudes the CIA hired for his Bay of Pigs/Sicario operation. For that, highly visible shootouts with a guy protected by the regime and popular with the people, which gets absolutely no blowback at all. They even hire a random drunken pilot, and it works!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.