From the Middle East to America then where
the studious mildly athletic preppy boy Jack Ryan is wearing his
Boston College tee-shirt while rowing his crew boat up a placid river. John
Krasinski is an engaging Jack Ryan.
Extreme closeups of his face while rowing make you like him right away. He’s the kind of guy mothers want their
daughters to marry. He’s the kind of guy the girl’s dad wants to corner into a
conversation about the Washington Redskins. Later on when he’s being the
virtuous non-polluting CIA analyst riding his bike to work we run into Jack’s
boss, James Greer (Wendell Pierce).
Pierce was a a laid back street-wise cop in “The Wire” but
here he’s been ddemoted to a job behind a desk after screwing up some unknown
business in Pakistan. Greer’s
not thrilled with anything about his new post.
He’s accustomed to more action
than he expects to get in this new backwater job posting. He’s an operations guy. The team he leads at Langley is a heady group
of academics and policy wonks.
“I heard he went all
Colonel Kurtz in the desert. Started making S.A.D dip their bullets in pig’s
blood so anyone they killed wouldn’t go to Paradise,” one analyst gossips to
Ryan. So you see right away the creators
of this spy thriller are not afraid to call a spade a spade, even if you can’t
tell one spade from another until it’s too late.
Dr. Jack Ryan’s office has this plaque at its entrance: “CTC Terror Finance and Arms Division.” He’s no James Bond, in other words. Jack
Ryan’s job is to find patterns of evil in the labyrinth of financial transactions. There’s a lot of alphabet soup mentioned,
things like SINGINT, fun to look up if you’re so inclined. I’ll
save you the trouble of an online search for SWIFT; It’s a system set up to track terrorist
financing networks around the world. And of course Ryan gets a lead on a high
value target who has an unusual pattern of financial transactions in Yemen
where the Saudis are battling Houthi rebels not only capsizing Yemen but
threatening the Saudi southern border.
The filming is picturesque, the camera roaming over medieval
fortificatioins and desert plains to (
Al Menajeer Syria) the house where the HVT lives with his wife and
children. A convoy of menacing
strangers armed to the teeth approaches the compound. Hanin, the wife of the terrorist mastermind,
is tasked to hide away a light complexioned Chechen terrorist and a bunch of
other guys. In Suleiman’s (the
HVT) world, women are expected to ‘know
their place.’
Of course, Ryan and
Greer are hot to find these sweethearts.
Among their more hideous schemes was a plan to infiltrate a joint
U.S./Arab military base and free a terrorist held prisoner there. Clever stuff all the way through makes “Tom
Clancy’s Jack Ryan” one of the liveliest action shows on TV. They way the terrorists gain access to the
compound is chilling. They’ve hidden
weapons in the sewn up body cavities of dead fighters who were sent to the
compound morgue. A massive gunfight follows and seems never-ending.
Performances were solid throughout. Great direction of this
fast action episode and taut editing made any weak spots fade quickly into
memory. The script writers did a fine job
with dialogue, quippy, spare, informed,
not drowning the characters in hollow “Go, go, go!” or “I’ve got this”
kind of heroics.
Virtue doesn’t triumph here. The bad guys get away in the
end as they often do in real life. As
far as serial action films go, this first episode of “Tom Clancy”s Jack Ryan”
sets a high bar for others including its own future episodes.
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