Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Oh lord, an origin story, where the boring ass analyst gets sent in a misguided op that turns him into Bourne. With a touch of Tenet, as Keneth Branagh is once again the evil Russian guy, more Byronic this time.
This is once again a period piece: Ryan joins the military because terrorists do 9/11, but he gets all banged up in an helicopter that falls with a mere RPG, those goddamn military contractors. After that single scene in a cramped chopper, he joins the spooks as a Wall Street suit.
I don’t understand why a CIA Man would need to work on some Wall Street broker sub-rosa, just have In-Q-Tel invest in the damn company. Having spooks launder money for foreign adversaries is a bridge too far? Do you even watch the news, this is from the time of Operation Fast and Furious.
His reluctant love interest is the physical therapist, hello Florence Nightingale. She thinks he’s cheating on her, but gets relieved it’s just covert work for a corrupt government. He downright tells her he is a spook in a Moscow hotel room, where a couple hours before some Ugandan goon tried to murder him.
She was roped in to a CIA op, but seems willing to butter up the Russian dude they are trying to bag. She ropes him in with her knowledge of Russian writers, and not the standard Tolstoy / Dostoyevski diptych, some obscure dude. Shown their work right there.
This buttering up is successful, but the CIA has a lot of moles, and the FSB skimped on the counter-espionage for some reason, the “Sorokin” state apparatchik wants to keep it at arms length, I guess. They steal the data, do the switcheroo, and miraculous manage to all leave the country alive, even after gun battles and car chases in the centre of Moscow.
Turns out the bad guy plan is to crash the dollar by selling off 2 trillion dollars of shit, as some Timothy McVeigh with better taste blows up Wall Street. A laughable plan, foiled by our analyst that brawls with the terrorist, steals the van and dumps it in the river. The terrorist was the bad guy’s own son, sent to live in Dearborn, Michigan under an assumed name. Of all the places he could go, a dying Rust Belt town would not be my first choice, but what do I know?
Our hero gets the girl, and gets the greatest gift he can get: meeting the president in the oval office. That would be Bush Jr, or Trump nowadays. What an underwhelming pleasure.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.