They really messed up the Ryan movie franchise with this one.
I think this also is the movie that made me dislike Affleck. But that´s not the reason for the mess up. By choosing Affleck to play Ryan and since he´s obviously much younger than Harison Ford, they needed to place the story before the previous movies. So they do what Hollywood likes to do alot: a reboot. They just picked out one of Clancys books for this (interestingly the one after "Clear and Present Danger") not caring for anything else but to cash in, which because of the laurels of the previous ones they did. And they changed so many things from the book it´s hardly recognizable.
Here we see a young Ryan who isn´t married yet and, of course, has no children. That produces continuity errors within the movies which is why I hate reboots. That is the main reason the story didn´t work in this movie for me.
But the movie itself was bad. It jumps through the plot like a kangaroo and it is incoherent. Although the cast reads good on paper the performances are all but forgettable.
And some notes about the summary of the movie here:
- 27,000 nuclear weapons. One is missing: wrong, it was a bomb from the Yom-Kipur-War and even in the movie no one missed it after the plane was shot down at the beginning.
- Jack Ryan discovers that an Islamic terrorist group is constructing a nuclear warhead: wrong again. It´s was a facist group led by an Austrian Neo-Nazi.
Review by ShubesBlockedParent2022-01-31T00:04:26Z
At a quick glance - and judging from the mediocre 70% overall rating on here - this movie was not well received. However, I found it very enjoyable, even though a bit dated. (Of course, at my age, I'm getting to where I prefer the "dated" movies as all the current stuff is mostly just tripe and rehashed vomitous.) Maybe I'm getting jaded by watching so many movies in the Horror genre here of late, and something that is completely different seems to bring a breath of fresh air. There were, yes, a few scenes that were eye-rollable but for the most part, it was an enjoyable, suspenseful, cat-and-mouse political thriller. I've only read a handful of the Tom Clancy novels (and it's been awhile) so I'm not one of those "It didn't mirror the novel word-for-word so it blows!" types. While I almost always prefer a movie that sticks close to the original story, I'm also wise enough to know you can't take a novel the length or breadth of one of Clancy's (or Stephen King's) and expect to compact it into a 120-minutes-or-less screen adaptation. With that said, maybe I'm a bit more forgiving than those who are so heavily criticizing this film but I still found it enjoyable and gripping enough to grab and KEEP my attention throughout. Would I watch it again? Absolutely. In spite of what everyone else is ranting about on here, this was a good film, definitely worth watching.