Film Review - Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

A reboot of the film series with the character of the same name, Shadow Recruit is a new story to feature Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) as it details his origins and a dastardly plot by the Russians to crash the US Economy.

To say I have been excited for this film is a serious understatement, ever since 2008 when it was announced that this reboot was going ahead and that in 2009 it was announced that Chris Pine was going to take the role my anticipation immediately was set in motion and this went into hyperdrive when Kenneth Branagh was going to direct as it was finally going to happen.

And now the time had come when I held my ticket and could go in and take my seat to watch it, I had waited a long time for this and now it had finally come but could the film itself deliver the goods despite this enormous anticipation.

Sadly not as this was a very sad disappointment and I take no pleasure in saying that at all as I wanted to love it but alas I cannot, before I go into those reasons I will talk about the one thing I did like about the film and that is Pine himself, watching him I thought of Alec Baldwin in the Hunt for Red October which is when he played the part and as the film went on he did start to grow on me and I hope he gets a Red October esque script to work with in the future.

But the real sin here is the script written primarily by David Koepp who also gave the Indiana Jones sequel the Kingdom of the Plastic Prop sorry Crystal Skull and his script here is simply pathetic, how so let me count the ways:

- The first of these is the story holds no real stakes to it, in Red October there was a real sense of danger and tension throughout that story as the Russians had developed a prototype silent drive system which in the wrong hands could spell disaster as well as rain destruction on the US with very little warning beforehand, here it's just another "Crash the American Dollar" plot that just sounds so so typical of a lot of recent spy pictures and as a result, there is no sense of jeopardy.

- The second is the misguided plotline itself with it wanting to tick every box at once for not only do you have the economy storyline there's also what I think to be a near pointless storyline with Jack and his fiancee Cathy played here by Keira Knightley who is okay despite her sometimes wobbly American accent but why on Earth is she even in this film, Jack survived just fine on his own in the Hunt for Red October whereas here they put here as A) this is a reboot and B) they want the female audience to come and frankly it feels pointless to go in this direction and the 3rd act just comes across as a bad outtake from Liam Neeson's Taken.

- And lastly the villains here are terrible, Branagh himself plays the chief Russian villain and every single time he was on screen I kept thinking of the towering presence of Sean Connery as Captain Marko Ramius in Red October and Branagh who is a perfectly fine actor even if he's a terrible action director just doesn't measure up and Kevin Costner is a poor substitute for James Earl Jones.

And so to wrap this up, I cannot in any good conscience recommend this new reboot as much I would love to do so in my heart of hearts given how much I had been looking forward to this film, rent the Hunt for Red October instead as that film has great performances, a tense storyline and top notch action whereas this one just feels very run of the mill, it's not terrible but it's just that kind of disappointment that makes you feel very sad afterwards, 1.5 out of 5.