Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

            Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
                 
               The Russians are back with brand new moscow !

Prior to 2011, nobody would have pegged Kenneth Branagh as the director who would bring Jack Ryan back to life.  But how would a director better known for filming scenes in Shakespearean productions fare with a huge budget and chase sequences? Well Then, 'Thor' happened - Branagh's entry in Marvel's superhero canon turned out to be an oddly effective blend of brains and brawn, and earned him his stripes as a blockbuster director. It's no doubt the reason why another major Hollywood studio was willing to take a chance on him helming a potentially enormously lucrative franchise reboot.

Taking full advantage of contemporary geopolitical realities, writers Adam Cozard and David Koepp make the effort to detail Ryan's formative years before his employment by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In an extended prologue therefore, Ryan is an undergrad at LSE when the Twin Towers were hit in 2001 and subsequently a United States Marine stationed in Afghanistan just two years later who is badly injured when the helicopter he was in was hit by terrorists. It is also with the latter that Ryan meets then-US Navy Commander William Harper (Kevin Costner), who recruits him for the CIA on account of his brilliant analytical mind and stations him in the heart of Wall Street.Jack Ryan (Chris Pine), as the film quickly establishes, is a hero in every sense of the word. A decorated war veteran with impeccable academic credentials. For years, Jack does his day job and slips his handler important nuggets of financial data. Just as his fiancée Cathy (Keira Knightley) starts to fret about the fraying state of their relationship, Jack uncovers a massive financial conspiracy engineered by Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh), a shady, off-the-books Russian operative who intends to kick off a double-barrelled terrorism attack on America.It's packed with dense detail and references to current geopolitics and financial mucking-about.

It was good to see Kevin Costner back on screen in a substantial role again. He was older of course, but still looking good. His character Harper may feel like any other mentor role in other espionage films, but Costner played him very well.The villain of the film Viktor Cherevin though was another matter altogether. Kenneth Branagh creates a strong antagonist with his subtly sinister portrayal of the Russian businessman with terrorism, economic and otherwise, on his mind. He completely transformed into his role very convincingly, with no trace of British-ness or can we say 'hemlet' ?

But this particular Jack Ryan did not feel like this was going to be the same man in the other older films where we knew the character Jack Ryan first, like "Hunt for Red October" (played by Alec Baldwin), "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger" (played by Harrison Ford) or even "Sum of All Fears" (played by Ben Affleck). This film only has the character Jack Ryan, but in a story not written by the books' author Tom Clancy at all.
Scrape away the fancy smartphones, cutting-edge technology and fancy security systems (which still aren't enough to stop a barely-trained agent when he's tossed unexpectedly into the field), and what you're left with is a film with a solidly old-fashioned heart, its core narrative plucked out of the icy tension of the Cold War and forged with the same easy mistrust of the Soviet Union that informed many a thriller of past. Shadow Recruit feels like a throwback to a more unreservedly glorious time, none more so in its wholly cynicism-free final scene - a moment so purely patriotic that it feels distressingly outdated.This film had an oddly generic feel like we have seen this story in some form before. Even if this was set several years post-9/11, it had that dated Cold War (a la classic James Bond) feel especially when the action shifted to Moscow. The camera work was excellent especially for the gunfights and car chases. That sequence of firm infiltration was very astutely edited with much tension, impossible as that could have been in real life. though, despite those gripes, "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" is still a very exciting action-packed thriller worth wathcing !