Jack Ryan is a rare diamond in the rough of January movies
It’s no secret that January is considered Hollywood’s dumping ground: a mass grave for misfits and miscreants whose releases have been strategically timed to go relatively unnoticed amid the plush pageantry of awards season. Every year brings the same ragged procession of interchangeable demonic possession movies (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, this weekend’s Devil’s Due), ham-fisted action epics (Renny Harlin’s mythological mega-flop The Legend of Hercules, the extremely dire-looking I, Frankenstein) and aggressively unappealing comedies (Ride Along, That Awkward Moment). Only the titles seem to change.
Shot in the dark · Chris Pine (above) stars in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the newest incarnation of author Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst turned field agent. – Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
There are exceptions, of course. The Oscar-nominated Brazilian import City of God was released in January, as was Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s genre-bending horror western From Dusk Till Dawn and Troy Duffy’s love-it-or-loathe-it cult classic The Boondock Saints. Liam Neeson has a very particular set of skills for scoring mid-winter hits, starting with the original Taken in 2009 and the underrated survivalist drama The Grey four years later. Now director Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet, Thor) is hoping to join their ranks with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, a sleek, ambitious modernization of the late Tom Clancy’s seminal spy series
The film, which follows a younger Ryan (Chris Pine) on his journey from rookie analyst to hardened field agent during an especially perilous mission to Moscow, was slated for a Christmas Day opening until Paramount decided to give the slot to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street instead. The decision made sense from a practical standpoint, even after Clancy’s death renewed interest in the film series and the books that had spawned it. After all, Scorsese’s film — a ferocious satire of corporate greed that was already in the news for having just narrowly escaped the dreaded NC-17 rating — was a surefire awards contender with a legendary director, a top-tier cast and a trailer that had been dissected and raved over for months.
Jack Ryan, by contrast, is a far riskier venture: an old-school espionage thriller built around a young star who has never carried a movie on his own before — although Kevin Costner is on hand as Ryan’s crotchety CIA mentor — and a hero who hasn’t been seen onscreen for over a decade. Pine, an affable presence in J.J. Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek series and Tony Scott’s runaway train thriller Unstoppable, is probably the least famous face to ever play the part of Ryan. The courageous spook was first introduced to moviegoers in director John McTiernan’s 1990 adaptation of Clancy’s most celebrated novel: The Hunt for Red October, where he was played by Alec Baldwin.
In 1992, action stalwart Harrison Ford stepped into the role for two further adventures: Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, more conventional political thrillers that saw Ryan and his family squaring off against I.R.A. assassins, Colombian drug cartels and several would-be kidnappers. Eight years after Ford’s last bow, Ben Affleck starred as Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, a film notable mainly for its disquieting depiction of a nuclear bomb being triggered at a football stadium in Baltimore.
Branagh, a filmmaker primarily known for his lavish, sometimes exhaustive Shakespeare adaptations, has refashioned himself into a competent hit-maker since helming the first Thor movie for Marvel back in 2011. It’s been fascinating to watch him revel in the inherent theatricality of these stories, whether it’s Clancy’s international intrigue or familial spats among the Asgardians. Judging from the Jack Ryan trailers and featurettes, he also looks lethally effective in his role as the film’s main villain: a corrupt Russian businessman with the deliciously diabolical moniker Viktor Cherevin.
Despite the ignominy associated with January openings, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is on track to become a bona fide box office success. The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend has become increasingly lucrative in recent years, and the film’s relatively modest $60 million budget should not be difficult to recoup, especially given the franchise’s historical popularity overseas. Also, even though Branagh’s movie is opening against three other wide releases — Ride Along, The Nut Job and Devil’s Due — its holiday competition would have been far stiffer, even without The Wolf of Wall Street in the mix. Maybe January has a silver lining after all: any halfway decent movie has a shot at being king of the dumping ground.
Landon McDonald is a graduate student studying public relations. His column “The Reel Deal” runs every other Thursday.