Film Review - Patriot Games (1992)

Patriot Games is the 2nd Jack Ryan film in the series and this time Harrison Ford takes on the role of Dr. Ryan from Alec Baldwin who played the role in "The Hunt for Red October", the story here concerns an IRA attack on the Royal Family which Ryan prevents but kills the brother of Sean Miller (Sean Bean) and now Miller wants revenge.

Patriot Games is for me, a complete failure of an action picture, this feeling driven primarily by my love of Red October plus having read Clancy's original book but there are two big reasons why I think this film fails in the way it does:

The first is that the story strays too far from the original novel, Red October managed to adapt its story very well into film in a way that not only captured the essence of the novel but managed to find its own way to work as a film, here it feels like a rewrite of the story so that it takes place after the events of Red October whereas the novel took place before the events of Red October and as a result, it doesn't work.

The second is the change of actor in the role of Dr. Ryan, Baldwin was a perfect choice for the part and nailed it in Red October, sadly other events saw him bow out and Ford took his place and he doesn't fit the role at all, now Ford has done some terrific action roles before this film and would do one a year later in The Fugitive but he just does not fit this part and whenever he was on screen I was wishing I was watching Baldwin doing the role as the story would have had a lot more impact had he come back to play the part.

What makes this feel worse is that the story to me is the Jack Ryan equivalent of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" in that it's a personal story about your lead character that has a big emotional impact when you've worked hard to establish the character with readers/viewers beforehand and sadly the full impact of the story in the film is diluted by having a new actor in the role instead of the previous one and in both cases it's a sad shame.

Hopefully Paramount doesn't make the same mistake twice in regards to Chris Pine's tenure in the part as I do think he is a good choice for the role (it's the only nice thing I can say about his role in This Means War) and if he is embraced in the part in the same way that Baldwin was in 1990 that Paramount will snap him up for a future film if it does well enough at the box office.

Now I'm sure some of you are thinking "what about if you haven't read the book" well if you haven't then it's a decent Harrison Ford action film with good direction, performances and villain even if it is a little average and somewhat forgettable in the long run.

And so with that out of the way, I can't recommend Patriot Games to fans of Clancy's book but I could somewhat to those wanting a good Harrison Ford action film as it works better if you haven't read the book, if you have then it's a failure on nearly every level, 1 out of 5.