Looking over the landscape of movies over the past decade, it’s almost as if someone got Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, James Bond, Jason Bourne, and others in a room together circa rougly 2004. And in their best Oprah voice, they exclaimed “YOU get a reboot! YOU get a reboot! YOU get a reboot! EVERYONE GETS A REBOOT!!!”
And so it continues with the character of Jack Ryan which casts Chris Pine (the rebooted Captain Kirk himself) as the fourth actor to play the role after Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck (soon to be rebooted Batman). Based on the works of Tom Clancy, this franchise got rolling in 1990 with The Hunt for Red October (Baldwin), continued with Ford in 1992’s Patriot Games and 1994’s Clear and Present Danger, and then onto 2003’s The Sum of All Fears with Affleck.
Like Sum of All Fears, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is yet another origin story of the character and how he got involved in the CIA in the first place. Affleck’s origin story worked in part due to its arrival less than two years after the events of September 11. The terrorist attack scenes involving Baltimore hit close to home after the tragic real-life events in New York City, Washington D.C., and rural Pennsylvania. In this reboot, it’s the event of 9/11 itself that influences Jack to his military and eventual CIA service.
We open with Jack as a student abroad when 9/11 occurs and this leads him to enlist in the military and an eventual injury sustained while serving in Afghanistan. His stateside rehab puts him in contact with a med student (Keira Knightley) who will become his fiancee and also with a CIA official (Kevin Costner) who’s on a recruiting (SHADOW RECRUITING!) mission. Costner’s casting as the wily veteran mentor was interesting to me in the sense that I bet the actor was probably offered the role of Ryan when Hunt for Red October was being developed (just an educated guess).
Costner recruits Ryan to go deep undercover as a Wall Street analyst whose main job is to keep an eye out for terrorist financial transactions. Jack discovers a plot to crash the U.S. financial market and perhaps carry out even more dastradly attacks on the homeland. This nefarious plot is led by a Russian baddie portrayed by the film’s director himeslf, Kenneth Branagh.
There’s a nifty sequence in Shadow Recruit where Jack and his fiancee must team up at a dinner meeting to trick Branagh’s villainous character. This portion is well-constructed and sufficiently suspenseful. Unfortunately, the remainder of the picture feels awfully familiar and unremarkable. The truth is that it’s easy to see why audiences were ambivalent about this franchise reboot and why it only earned a middling $50 million stateside.
Like The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012, Shadow Recruit feels unnecessary. Also like that film, it’s an easy enough viewing experience and has its moments but that’s not quite enough to justify its existence. We’ve seen Batman and James Bond rebooted to terrific results in recent years. This reboot is one that is mildly entertaining but easily forgotten.
**1/2 (out of four)
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