JACK RYAN SHADOW RECRUIT

SYNOPSIS A young Jack Ryan starts his path into the shadowy world of espionage When rebooting a franchise you have to choose what to keep and what to update. Keep the wrong elements and you can end up with something of a mess; adding pressure in this case is the death last year of author Tom Clancy from which the movie draws its inspiration. Shadow Recruit is a not a mess but there have been some rather strange choices in the creative division. The main one is to keep one of the most dated elements associated with Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character - Russia. Since we’re updating the character into a post 9/11 world why, one wonders, did we need to keep the evil Ruskies as villains? Not subtle villains either but Bond- like ones who are accompanied by evil ominous choir music. It is admittedly enjoyable watching Kenneth Branagh as Victor Cherevin - he still feels like he should battling MI6’s Bond than the CIA’S Jack. Which is sad because a lot of other things in Shadow Recruit are updated much more effectively, putting a young inexperienced Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) into the modern age of espionage - with tech files and stock markets replacing dossiers and cyanide pills. We get to see the start of Ryan’s path as a spy which hasn’t made it to the screen before (the closest we got was early career in the Sum Of All Fears). This gives us more motivation for the character rather than just general patriotism. There is one very well done sequence that, despite being rather clichéd in its set up, still manages to create real tension and excitement, proving that old tricks can still be pulled off effectively. In the action department the film is surprisingly restrained which is both a good and a bad thing ,on the one hand we get to the story and characters before the loud explosions ,on the other hand said story is (as mentioned) not the most original one and you start to feel quite relived when Jack Ryan goes Jack Bauer. FINAL VERDICT 5/10 it may re-tread old ground but is still enjoyable enough.