August 3rd, 1994
More like CLEAR AND PRESZZZZzzzzzzz, am I right, guys?
Oh, am I wrong? Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not the best judge, because I’m a heathen when it comes to Jack Ryan. My dad loved Tom Clancy books, my wife and many of my friends consider THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER to be one of the all time greats, many people love this character, I just think that gene skipped me. But here we are most of the way through our revisit of the summer of ’94 and it feels like we’re low on traditional blockbusters, so I was kind of excited to see CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. There are plenty of things to like about it, especially when discussing it, but unfortunately I found it mostly dull to watch compared to PATRIOT GAMES, which I somewhat enjoyed and respectfully labelled “Adult Contemporary Action.”
This, too, is for the older folks that want some of the fantasy of Exceptional Men Who Get Shit Done but without the classless excess of flying kicks or other cool shit. It begins by massaging the Adult Contemporary Action erogenous zones, showing people in uniforms operating various types of machinery on a submarine and a US Coast Guard vessel. The inciting incident is the Coast Guard boarding a suspicious yacht in the Caribbean and discovering its American businessman owner has been murdered by Colombians. Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford between THE FUGITIVE and SABRINA) is a CIA analyst who looks into it and discovers the American got offed by a cartel because he was laundering money for them and tried to embezzle some.
This becomes an international incident because President Bennett (Donald Moffat, THE THING) was good buddies with the businessman/launderer/embezzler, he gets really pissed about it and gives National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harris Yulin, SCARFACE) the ol’ too bad we can’t illegally send special ops guys after the cartel but we couldn’t because illegal stuff is illegal and we would never do illegal stuff that is illegal you know what I mean wink wink nudge nudge you understand what I’m telling you to do here don’t you I think you do but I didn’t say it but you get it.
Normally this wouldn’t be Ryan’s problem, but his great friend Admiral Greer (James Earl Jones, last heard in THE LION KING) is being treated for pancreatic cancer and appoints him as reluctant Deputy Director of Intelligence. Ryan requests money from Congress to fund Colombians fighting the drug cartels, having no idea that this asshole CIA Deputy Director of Operations Ritter (Henry Czerny, soon to play Kittridge in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE) is setting him up to take the blame for funding a black ops team led by badass operative John Clark (Willem Dafoe, LIGHT SLEEPER), the character later played by Michael B. Jordan in WITHOUT REMORSE. While Ryan investigates and analyzes and what not there are scenes of Clark and his team doing COMMANDO shit in the jungle.
So there are two sets of villains: the crooked American government he works with and the cartel who try to murder him when he goes to negotiate seizing their assets. Drug lord Ernesto Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval, one of the cops who killed Radio Raheem) says evil stuff and hangs out at his mansion (which has a bowling alley like Daniel Plainview’s) while his right hand man Felix Cortez (Joaquim de Almeida shortly before DESPERADO) does the dirty work.
The funniest thing in the movie is that Ryan’s wife Cathy (Anne Archer, THE HONKERS) coincidentally has a friend named Moira (Ann Magnuson between CABIN BOY and TANK GIRL) who’s been having romantic sex rendezvous with Cortez. She has no idea he’s a cartel operative trying to use her because she’s a secretary for the FBI. She actually tells Cathy about her fling and describes him as looking like Jack “except Latin.” I don’t really see the resemblance so it seems like it’s only there to force a comparison between the two, as rival intelligence officers. I was hoping there would be a part where Cortez has to pass as Jack by doing a white guy voice, and no one catches him.
Eventually Ryan and Clark cross paths and reluctantly team up to rescue members of the team who the government is willing to leave behind. The ol’ pro-military but anti-government-especially-those-bureaucrats action movie standby (see: UNCOMMON VALOR, etc.). I heard somewhere that Jack Ryan in the books is not some action hero, he’s an analyst, more of a nerd who does what he can when he’s thrown into it. And that’s definitely what Ford does here – the famous stills from the movie are him cowering. He runs awkward. He has a cowlick sometimes. And Clark seems very skeptical about him being able to help at all.
I respect that but also I gotta be honest, at least at this level of quality I’d rather see an action movie than an intelligence/investigation movie with occasional danger. It does ultimately turn into a RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II/MISSING IN ACTION type bring-our-boys-home mission, complete with finding the prisoners in a weakened condition and seeing their relief. Ironically in my PATRIOT GAMES review I noted that “he doesn’t go in like Rambo,” he just gives them the intelligence and then stays home and watches on a screen as the pros take care of it.” I thought that was cool, but I also wrote that “[director Philip] Noyce has the right idea: just because this guy is a smarty pants doesn’t mean he’s not gonna end the movie in a fist fight to the death on a speed boat that’s on fire and careening toward land with no one driving.” Unfortunately, Noyce either no longer believed that by the time of this one, or was forced by the bureaucrats to abandon his principles. The helicopter-dangling scene is pretty cool but it doesn’t feel like a big action climax, especially when TRUE LIES just did a more exciting one, and not as the finale.
Fortunately there’s some exciting and memorable stuff that’s not violence. To me the highlight is the epilogue where Ryan has the audacity to chew out the president. Fuck you, the president. Jack is right on this one. Another highlight is the scene where he’s at a computer breaking into government files and realizes Ritter is in there at the same time deleting them. He calls him on the phone to slow him down while trying to print out evidence of wrongdoing. Then he gets up and opens the door and Ritter is right on the other side rushing toward him. I didn’t realize they were in offices across from each other this whole time! It’s a great scene.
As far as the politics of this thing, it’s a real have/eat cake situation – we get to enjoy soldiers illegally going to war with drug dealer bad guys, then at the end we’re told it was wrong. Mostly because some soldiers died doing it. But I appreciate that Ryan objects and becomes a whistleblower. That doesn’t make him a saint, but we do need more guys like that in the job.
As is standard for Adult Contemporary Action there are a ton of recognizable faces in the supporting cast, a mix of veteran character actors and up-and-comers who went on to bigger things. Clark’s squad includes Benjamin Bratt (ONE GOOD COP) and Raymond Cruz (UNDER SIEGE), Thora Birch (MONKEY TROUBLE) briefly returns as Ryan’s daughter, Dean Jones (all the old Disney movies) plays the CIA director, Rex Linn (Last seen in WYATT EARP) shows up as a cop, and it’s the penultimate movie for Hope Lange (DEATH WISH). We also get someone from Perfect Strangers (Belita Moreno), someone from Ally McBeal (Greg Germann), someone from Homicide: Life On the Street (Reed Diamond), someone from Chicago Hope (Vondie Curtis-Hall, last seen in CROOKLYN), someone later on The Wire (Reg E. Cathey), someone later on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Clark Gregg, last seen in I LOVE TROUBLE), and even someone from Pee-wee’s Playhouse (Miss Yvonne herself, Lynne Marie Stewart, is glimpsed as Greer’s secretary!). Most importantly, Ted Raimi (DARKMAN) plays “Satellite Analyst.” I’m not sure who plays him in WITHOUT REMORSE.
Director Noyce was of course returning after the success of PATRIOT GAMES. This was his movie between SLIVER and THE SAINT. The screenplay is credited to Donald E. Stewart (who wrote the other two, but also JACKSON COUNTY JAIL, DEATHSPORT, and an old manuscript that later became HOSTILES), Steven Zaillian (between SCHINDLER’S LIST and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE story credit) and motherfuckin John MAGNUM FORCE Milius. That’s a hell of a trio! Three the hard way. Milius actually wrote the first draft for John McTiernan after RED OCTOBER, Stewart rewrote it for Noyce, then Zaillian rewrote that because Clancy didn’t like it. There were also apparently rewrites to appease the Pentagon, it should be noted. Gotta keep those guys happy. Milius supposedly stayed on as a consultant for action scenes.
I guess I can say I kind of liked CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, but I’m not itching to watch it again.
August 7th, 2024 at 3:56 pm
I agree that the two Ford/Noyce Jack Ryan joints are a little too tasteful to really get the blood pumping, but I will stand up for HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. I watched it recently for the first time in 30 years and, man, does it hold up. It’s not trying to be a middlebrow spin on an action movie like the others. It’s just trying to be a straight-up thriller, and at that it succeeds. It’s perfectly paced and riveting all the way through, aided by dynamic camerawork and lively performances from a murderer’s row of classic That Guys. Baldwin is way more convincing at the whole nerd-in-over-his-head thing than Ford, and Connery gets perhaps his last good role. It’s just a really solid movie that feels a few years ahead of its time. It feels like the movie all 90s studio action thrillers wanted to be. It’s better than almost all of them.