As an attempt to reboot the Jack Ryan movie franchise, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit was a dismal failure. The series had produced three films in the 1990s—The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994)—and one earlier attempt at a series reboot in 2002 with The Sum of All Fears, all of which were based on best-selling novels by Tom Clancy. Shadow Recruit was unique as it was based on an original script, rather than derived one of Clancy’s works, and it clearly aimed to create a new, younger, sleeker, faster iteration of the franchise, casting Chris Pine as the determined CIA analyst-turned-man of action. Pine, who was already the center of the rebooted Stark Trek series, makes for a good Ryan, as he conveys both intelligence and a robust physicality that makes his feats of derring-do believable, even when they verge on the ridiculous (when he jumps on a motorcycle late in the game, you can sense the producers’ desire to tap into Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible mojo). And, if Shadow Recruit has a real problem, it is precisely its lack of unique identity. While much of it is good, it often feels overly derivative of other action movie franchises, which is probably why it failed to reignite the series.

Pine was the fourth actor to step into Ryan’s shoes, following Alec Baldwin in Red October, Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears. Like Baldwin and Affleck, Pine is playing a young version of the character, although Shadow Recruit is the first film to begin before Ryan’s tenure with the CIA, depicting him as a graduate student in England whose experience seeing the horrors of 9/11 on television inspire him to join the Marines, where is in involved in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan that literally breaks his back and ends his military career. On the plus side, his physical therapist is a third-year medical student named Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley) who later becomes his girlfriend, and he also catches the attention of Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner), a CIA official who recruits him to finish his doctorate in economics and then embed himself in a Wall Street firm so he can secretly look for bad guys trying to use the banking system to fund terrorist operations.

Fast forward 10 years, and we find Ryan drawn into a conspiracy involving a Russian oligarch named Victor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh) trying to crash the U.S. dollar and plan a massive terror attack in a coordinated effort to destroy the American economy. Ryan is just an analyst with three weeks of training on “The Farm,” but he quickly demonstrates that his brawn matches his brains when he has to take out a would-be assassin in a posh Moscow hotel room. To the film’s credit, the fight is memorably down and dirty, and Ryan’s desperate act of survival that results in the assassin’s death is brutal and leaves him clearly shaken. He doesn’t stay shaken for long, though, and Shadow Recruit might have been a more interesting film if it had played more on Ryan’s inexperience in the field, instead of quickly allowing him to become a routine action hero, rushing into danger to save the day in grandiose style. Along the way we get some good suspense sequences, including a drawn-out affair in which Ryan must leave Cathy, who has surprised him in Moscow, unaware that he works for the CIA, at dinner with Cherevin while he attempts to break into the Russian’s office and hack his computer.

Branagh, who directed the film in addition to playing the heavy, keeps the story lively and engaging, and when the film isn’t engaging in conventional action thrills, it has a meaty, at times Hitchcockian sense of tension that really works. Some of the best moments involve Ryan trying to hide his true nature from Cathy while also navigating the uncharted waters into which he has been so unceremoniously thrown, and in those moments we can see the possibility of a different, probably better, movie that is more about Ryan’s troubled emergence, rather than his easy slide into action heroics. That would be a less conventional movie, to be sure, and despite Branagh’s rise into the world of film via daring Shakespeare adaptations like Henry V (1989) and Hamlet (1996), his more recent work has taken on a rather familiar sheen that works with the material, but fails to elevate it in any truly interesting way.

Copyright © 2018 James Kendrick

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