Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Review

MINOR SPOILERS:

What does it take to make a reasonably acceptable and middling action thriller nowadays? Step one: Insert blandly charismatic good-looking actor. Step two: Insert a villain from some foreign country and give him a silly over-the-top accent. And finally, step 3: Throw in a generic semi-plausible plot to destroy America to tie it all together and you got yourself Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Well-known and respected in theatre and film circles, 5-time Oscar nominated Kenneth Branagh helms Shadow Recruit as he continues his foray into passionless crowd-pleasing commercial fare after the success of his 2011 film, Thor. With Shadow Recruit, Branagh takes on directing and acting duties and does an adequate job in both regards. And that is the perfect word to describe this movie: adequate. Everything is sleek and stylish but none of it resonates and none of it is engrossing or involving. With a vague title that sounds like it was plucked from some shoddy cheaply made video game, Shadow Recruit is one of those confounding movies that is very smartly and professionally put together and yet at the same time, is incredibly dumb. 

To rush through the plot much in the same way the film chooses to hurtle through it, Jack (Pine) is a young and gifted Economics student who decides to join the army after witnessing the events of 9/11. Next moment, he’s in a helicopter in Afghanistan that gets attacked by a Mujahideen missile. A moment after that, Jack is struggling to walk again at a rehab facility while also proceeding to fall in love with a medical student who may or may not be deathly anorexic (that might just be what Keira Knightley normally looks like; the movie never makes it clear). At the same time, he promptly gets recruited as an analyst by shady CIA operative Harper (Costner) and is tasked with monitoring Wall Street for traces of terrorist financing. All this, of course, is character-building at its finest. Fifteen minutes or so of rushed exposition in and we still have no clue who Jack Ryan is but no worries, we won’t know who he is by the time the movie’s over anyway. 

To specify what’s wrong with a movie such as this and pinpoint why exactly it is a failure, it all begins and ends with the characters. As Jack Ryan, Chris Pine does what Chris Pine always does in his films but very little of his natural charisma or charm comes through in Shadow Recruit’s script. A safe and insipid hodgepodge of characteristics, this edition of Ryan lacks the relatability or personality that Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin managed to give the role in the past. The same criticism can be levelled at the other principal characters in Shadow Recruit. With Russians being the designated villains this time around, Kenneth Branagh does his best (read cartoonish) impression of a Russian accent as Victor Cherevin, a character with hazy and unclear motives of revenge and a plan to plunge America into a second Great Depression. With a penchant for classical music and a love of Napoleon (which is used in the oddest way possible as a hint at his future plans), Cherevin has as much depth as a villain you’d find in a B movie. To give you an idea of the crude subtlety of Shadow Recruit, the film chooses to introduce Cherevin to the audience by having him beat the crap out of some hapless random guy within about 20 seconds of introducing him. Why, you may ask? Well, how else are we supposed to know he’s a bad guy?! As Jack’s long-suffering girlfriend Cathy, Keira Knightley can do nothing with the weak and simplistic significant other role she’s stuck with. And although the film does spend a surprisingly considerable (and excessive) amount of time on the relationship element, do not be fooled: she is there solely as a plot device and to raise the stakes when she predictably and duly finds herself taken as a hostage. One of the main subplots of Shadow Recruit is Ryan’s struggle to reconcile the secrecy requirements of his job with being in a committed relationship but all of it is done without much conviction and it’s all something we’ve seen many times before (James Cameron’s True Lies does it best). The film also misses a golden opportunity as it commits the unforgivable crime of casting creepy looking go-to villain character actor Colm Feore and then proceeding to not reveal him to be a double-crossing traitor. 

Equipped with such characters and with a second-rate storyline that clearly got converted into a Jack Ryan vehicle, Shadow Recruit doesn’t demand much attention as it soon devolves into a disinterested series of events. As a result of this, the action set pieces, although solidly constructed, are completely neutered and fail to pack an emotional punch. Being a Jack Ryan movie, the film needs Ryan to propel the plot and to be at the forefront of all significant moments in the story but this requires a level of contrivance and silliness that simply cannot work if its scenes are played as straight as Shadow Recruit chooses to play them (a ludicrous motorcycle chase scene is one of many examples). In a moment of overly patriotic cheesiness, the completely unprepared Ryan luckily survives an assassination attempt and is told he made it out of there because he is a “marine”. And in what would be a comedic scene in a different movie, Ryan manages to crack Cherevin’s plot in less than a minute as he directs a group of analysts working feverishly on computers. Even the now-rescued and thus redundant Cathy has her moment to shine as she pitches in with her own bit of detective work. 

Verdict: As far as franchise revivals go, Shadow Recruit falls somewhere right smack dab in the middle of the pack. Instantly forgettable and completely devoid of personality, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is one of those unique movies that leaves you struggling to remember details of it the moment you step out of the theatre. 

C

Trailer:

Movie info:

Runtime: 105 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Chris Pine, Kenneth Branagh, Keira Knightley, Kevin Costner

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Screenplay: Adam Kozad, David Koepp

Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos