Rating- * * (2/5)
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the release of this film, the latest in the franchise of films based on Tom Clancy’s CIA operative Jack Ryan. All of Clancy’s stories involve some kind of political or military controversy in which only Jack Ryan really knows what’s going on and no one else will believe him. In this film, Ryan (Ben Affleck) is a rookie CIA researcher who learns of a plot by an international terrorist organization to start a nuclear war between Russia and the United States so that the two will destroy each other and stop influencing the rest of the world. The first move to be made is the detonation of a small nuclear device in Baltimore during a big football game being attended by the President (James Cromwell). Ryan gets the word to the President’s adviser (Morgan Freeman) just in time for the President to get his motorcade away from ground zero, but unfortunately the shock wave from the bomb knocks his car over, killing Freeman and injuring the President. The controversy about this film stems from the nuclear attack scene. Many people worried that Americans could not psychologically handle the idea of a nuclear attack on a major city and that the film would do more harm than good to the American public. After seeing the scenes, I was astonished that there was any controversy at all; the few seconds that encompass the explosion are extremely muted compared to other movie explosions, such as the nuclear explosion in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. There is a shot of some workers in a hospital being knocked over by the blast and the windows being blown out before a quick cut-away; then there is a shot of the President’s motorcade being knocked off the road and rolling a few times from the shock wave; then the helicopter containing Jack Ryan is blown sideways and loses its propeller before falling to the ground; the final shot is of the mushroom cloud rising far off in the distance as Ryan climbs out of the helicopter wreckage. We are never shown any of the skyscrapers that were surely knocked down, or the football stadium full of people that must have been vaporized; in fact, the 100,000 people in the stadium are never even mentioned for the rest of the film! And the hospital workers that were blown away by the blast- they all end up treating the wounded. For those of you not familiar with the workings of a nuclear device, here’s what would have really happened: the hospital workers would not have left corpses, but rather an imprinted burn mark on the wall they were standing near. Jack Ryan and the helicopter would be a melted mass of metal and tissue fused together, and even assuming they were far enough away from the blast, no one could survive a helicopter crash from 1,000 feet in the air! It’s the movies, you say, and that stuff doesn’t matter. Ok, I’ll give you that much, but the fact that this attack is looked at as no more than an insult to the President for the rest of the movie is pretty ridiculous and trivial. What about all the lives lost? While the film does have a pretty good knowledge of CIA and military procedural details and some good performances by the entire cast, including the President’s advisers, it misses the mark on what surely was the point of Clancy’s novel; what can happen when we don’t pay enough attention to the thousands of nuclear devices floating around the globe? The screenplay stays close to the story but all the problems come from the fact that it is a little too Hollywood-ized; the Arab terrorists from the book must be changed to a more politically correct bad guy, the Nazis, because of course there aren’t enough Nazis to hurt the film’s earnings if they are offended; and of course, Jack Ryan needs a girlfriend because women are so stupid that they won’t go see a movie unless there is a romance involved (keep in mind that these are not my opinions, but those of the Hollywood executives). Ben Affleck does a good job filling the shoes of his predecessors, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, as Jack Ryan and I am looking forward to seeing him in another Tom Clancy film. Unfortunately, this one is just a little too unrealistic and Hollywood-ized for me to recommend, but if you are a fan of the franchise it is worth watching anyway.