Chris Pine (from Wonder Woman) stars as Jack Ryan – the lead character in this movie. He does a good job of it too.
Supporting cast members include Kevin Costner (from Waterworld) as his recruiter from the CIA, and Keira Knightley as his fiancée who discovers his line of work and ends up helping him out on a dangerous mission. Kevin does a good job, and Keira is alright. Kenneth Branagh plays the chief villain quite well too.
The premise of this movie is pushing lies from the outset – what do you expect from Hollywood? But the action and plot are still fairly captivating.
There’s an unhealthy dose of drama in the first 25 minutes. Impressionable people will end up thinking that rowing and launching insults at your partner is a way to make them treat you better. Treat them mean, keep them keen? Not for me thanks.
There’s also a bit of drug glorification in this movie, which features the consumption of illicit pills and injectables followed by depictions of feeling good. To say I’m not impressed would be an understatement.
Half way in, the action gets a bit tense & gritty for about 15 minutes. It becomes very tempting to fast forward if you’ve seen this movie before. This part may be important to the plot, but it could have been condensed for smoother viewing, especially for rewatchers. A bit later, we have a similar problem although the tense gritty drama is then mixed in with a car chase so the tempo is constantly undulating – I personally find this quite irritating. The ending is a lot smoother though, when the focus turns back to America, while still carrying a good pace, but trumpeting the same kind of nonsense as we started out with. I reckon this movie was made as a recruitment drive, encouraging simple-minded highly-strung patriotic yes-men to join law enforcement agencies. It’s like a cross between Mission Impossible and NCIS.
Overall I rate Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) as just OK. If the grittier bits were better condensed and the cooler bits were more omnipresent, it could easily be a Decent or even Pretty Good movie, but as it stands, I rate it just OK.