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. (read the rest of this shit…)
May 3, 1991
I think there is some subtle commentary about policing early in the movie, which I will go into, but for the most part it’s not about that. Instead this movie – which was only the fifth release from Disney’s not-for-kids label Hollywood Pictures – really is a fusion of the type of vibe of those two posters. It’s a gritty police/crime thriller about a cop whose partner gets killed, but in addition to going after the people he considers responsible, he and his wife take care of and then try to adopt the dead partner’s three adorable daughters. The amount of screen time and sincerity it puts into the second part is very unusual, so although this is in many ways not my type of movie, I respect its bold mix of genres. 
Joel Schumacher’s FALLING DOWN (1993) is a movie I’ve always hated for what I thought it was saying. Watching it again a couple decades later I think I was partly wrong. Maybe even mostly wrong. But I still can’t get all the way on board. I’ll try to explain why.
