Movie Review: Patriot Games (1992)

A thriller that easily abandons any sense of gritty realism and rolls over to die on the meek hill of Hollywood excess.

Harrison Ford brings Tom Clancy's hero Jack Ryan back to the screen, and he is surrounded by no shortage of talent including Anne Archer, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Harris.  But Patriot Games is too eager to pile on the fake threat by villains in the shape of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter group. The bad guys combine the worst excess of incredible, inexplicable resources attached to stunning incompetence and lack of discipline when it matters most.

Retired CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Ford) is in London to give a speech when he foils an attempted assassination of a member of the Royal Family by Irish terrorists. The terrorist hit-squad includes brothers Patrick and Sean Miller; Ryan kills Patrick, and Sean Miller (Sean Bean) is captured but traumatized by his young brother's death and vows revenge.

The terrorist group is led by Kevin O'Donnell (Patrick Bergin) whose methods are too extreme even for the IRA. O'Donnell and his men violently free Miller during his transfer to prison, and are soon distracted from their homeland mission: they head to the US to take pot-shots at Ryan, his wife Cathy (Anne Archer) and young daughter Sally. With his family threatened, Ryan rejoins the CIA to help bring down the terrorists, who take refuge at a training camp in the North African desert -- but only temporarily. O'Donnell, Miller and their crew are soon back on US soil, mounting a most ridiculous full frontal commando assault on Ryan's home.

Patriot Games collapses early and often by abandoning all links to reality in a film that demands some semblance of authenticity. The ease with which the terrorists criss-cross the Atlantic is laughable. The abandonment of their struggle to pursue a distraction in eliminating Ryan is ridiculous. The spectacular resources they bring to the battle to free Sean Miller en-route to prison are impressive but absurd. The British security arrangements and responses to terrorism are breathtaking in their ineptitude.

Worse of all, the sudden incompetence of the terrorists at critical moments, in being unable to complete the opening assassination or achieve any of their targets at Ryan's house, just amplifies the farcical nature of the script. In both instances director Phillip Noyce effectively freezes time to allow Ryan's heroic intervention.

Along with Harrison Ford and Anne Archer, a strong supporting cast barely saves Patriot Games from fully-baked turkey status. James Earl Jones is head of the CIA; Samuel L. Jackson a military training officer; Richard Harris an IRA fundraiser in the US; all are nearly wasted as Patriot Games lurches from one ludicrous moment to the next. Rarely have so many stars been so badly let-down by so much nonsense.

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Movie Review: The Sum Of All Fears (2002)

Many films deal with the threat of a nuclear war; few dare to go ahead and actually portray the detonation of a nuclear device against a civilian population.

Half-way through The Sum Of All Fears, a nuclear bomb hidden in a vending machine explodes in Baltimore during the Super Bowl. It is a relatively shocking and brave plot twist, but the aftermath is handled sensitively. Real-life events after Hurricane Katrina proved that the United States is actually a lot less ready to respond to such catastrophes.

The Sum Of All Fears gains an enormous amount of momentum from the explosion, and the second half of the film, in which the world stumbles towards all-out nuclear warfare, is injected with heightened tension and urgency.

Based on the Tom Clancy book, The Sum Of All Fears hinges on a lost nuclear bomb falling into the hands of European neo-Nazis. They put the device to use in an attempt to trigger an all-out mutually destructive nuclear war between the United States, under the leadership of President Fowler (James Cromwell) and Russia. It is up to the CIA's Director William Cabot (Morgan Freeman) and junior analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) to intervene in a desperate race against time before all the bombs are unleashed.

The movie has its creaky moments and not unexpectedly stretches the bounds of credibility in the interest of Hollywoodizing real-world politics, but director Phil Alden Robinson generally has his hand firmly on the tension dial and smoothly cranks it up with a continuous layering of short, sharp, and effective action sequences. Freeman provides the necessary gravitas while Affleck finds a comfort zone as the young, smart but mistake-prone Ryan.

The Sum Of All Fears is never less than gripping, as it finds and delivers a highly satisfying blend of high-octane thrills mixed with reality-inspired geo-political intrigue.

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