JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT (2014) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

jack ryan: shadow recruit (2014) movie

Genre              |   Action Thriller

Classification   |   M

Running time   |   105 minutes

Released         |   17 January 2014

cast

Chris Pine ... Jack Ryan
Keira Knightley ... Cathy Muller
Kevin Costner ... Thomas Harper
Kenneth Branagh ... Viktor Cherevin

director

Kenneth Branagh

writer

​Adam Cozad ... (written by) and
David Koepp ... (written by)
 
Tom Clancy ... (based on characters created by)

cinematographer

Haris Zambarloukos ... director of photography

music

​Patrick Doyle

film editor

​Martin Walsh

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box office result

Worldwide               $​135,511,030  

Australia                 $​4,919,544

North America        $​50,577,412

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movie minutiae

Chris Pine, who appeared in STAR TREK (2009), takes over the role of Jack Ryan from Harrison Ford, who appeared in the original STAR WARS trilogy. Keira Knightley, who appeared in STAR WARS: EPISODE ONE - THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999), takes of the role of Cathy Ryan from Gates McFadden, who appeared on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (1987-1994).

Director Sir Kenneth Branagh and Nonso Anozie collaborated on CINDERELLA (2015) and ARTEMIS FOWL (2019).

When Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) asks Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner) who he really works for, he lists the Treasury Department. Costner played Treasury Agent Eliot Ness in THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987).

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JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT (2014) STORY SYNOPSIS

​To his friends and loved ones, young Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) appears to be an ordinary executive; however, he has secretly worked for the CIA for years. Ryan was originally brought in to crunch global data, but when he uncovers a carefully planned scheme to crash the U.S. economy and spark global chaos, he becomes the only man with the skills to stop it. Now a full operative, Ryan finds himself caught between his secretive handler, his clueless fiancee and a brilliant Russian leader.

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT (2014) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 16 January 2014

Pop ​Movee Rating

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is a reboot for Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst-turned-agent, who, in his literary adventures, helped to save the “free world” on more than one occasion. The film adventures of Jack Ryan started with Alec Baldwin, continued with Harrison Ford and was last on the big screen with Ben Affleck in the title role. For this new film, Chris Pine, who has played Captain Kirk in the last two STAR TREK movies, has taken on the Jack Ryan role; albeit as a younger, less experienced version than the one audiences are used to seeing.

The film starts with Ryan attending an English university as a mathematics major on the day of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York. The action jumps forward 18 months to Afghanistan, where Ryan has become a US Marine in a show of personal patriotism. Ryan is seriously injured on a helicopter mission but manages to save the lives of two fellow Marines. Ryan’s courage under fire, along with his ability to decipher complex problems, brings him to the attention of CIA operative Thomas Harper, played by Kevin Costner. At the same time he is approached by the Agency, he strikes up a relationship with his rehab physician, Dr Cathy Muller, played by the always-gorgeous Keira Knightley. 

The story jumps forward ten years to 2013 and Ryan, who is now entrenched as a CIA operative, is a financial compliance analyst for a Wall Street firm. Ryan’s attention is caught  by a Russian company that is investing heavily in US dollars and a trip to Moscow results in the transformation of Ryan from analyst to field operative.

There’s a lot to like about JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT.

For one, there’s Chris Pine. The jury’s still out about whether Pine is a bona fide movie star, but he’s easy to watch in everything he does. In JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT, he’s best in the film’s quieter moments, especially in his scenes with Kevin Costner after his life has been threatened by a private security officer who has been sent to collect Ryan from the Moscow Airport. There’s not nearly as much swagger in the Ryan character as STAR TREK's Kirk, but Pine brings an honesty to Ryan, as he struggles to balance the escalation of his professional life with the love he has for Cathy. 

Kenneth Branagh is also good as the Russian patriot Viktor Cherevin. The character starts off as a one-note villain, but grows as the story develops and develops a degree of sympathy as the audience learns that his act of patriotism has underlying symbolism for him.

The script uncomfortably inserts Keira Knightley’s character into the Moscow segment of the story, but, as a result, her presence helps deliver the film’s best sustained set-piece. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of CASINO ROYALE, the Second Act of SHADOW RECRUIT is built around a dinner scene between Pine, Knightley and Branagh.

The Third Act of the film stumbles quite badly, as massive logic leaps are required to keep the story moving toward its conclusion. At 105 minutes, the film moves at a good pace, but a little more time and care should have been taken with the action sequences back in New York to provide the pay-off to what had been a pretty good set-up in the First and Second Acts. One ‘coincidence’ is especially on-the-nose and made it hard to maintain a suspension-of-disbelief because the story is so clumsy in its use. Fortunately, because of the film’s fairly conservative $60 million budget, there’s little in the way of Hollywood’s current ‘destruction porn’ obsession. The final minutes of the New York sequence are more like Christopher Nolan’s treatment of ‘war’ action in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, relying more on physical action than CGI rendered destruction.

Kenneth Branagh is much more an actor’s Director than he is an ‘Action Director’ and JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT benefits from his ability to get the most out of Chris Pine, Keira Knightley and Kevin Costner. There’s subtlety and nuance in the scenes where he simply plants the camera and records two people talking. Unlike his handling of the action material in THOR, he doesn’t quite deliver what audiences have come to expect of the set-pieces on show in other spy franchises such as James Bond, Mission: Impossible or Jason Bourne. 

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is a solid effort and no one’s reputation is going to be damaged as a result of being associated with the film. It asks the audience to make a couple of leaps that it shouldn’t have and lets itself down with its poor attention to story detail in its last 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, the financial performance of the film in the US has been moderate and it will struggle to recoup its production budget in that market. Elsewhere, the film has played better and its international performance may be enough to convince producers, distributors and financiers that a follow-up is worth developing as the on-screen talent of Pine, Knightley and Costner works exceptionally well.

If there is a sequel, it may be worth referencing the literary source material rather than a new story. Let’s face it; Clancy didn’t sell all those books because they were bad!

JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT MOVIE (2014) USEFUL LINKS

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Wikipedia
​Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) - IMDb
​Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) - Rotten Tomatoes​

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