Man Hunt/Rogue Male

If someone pontificates the blanket statement "there's never been a remake of a film better than the original," here's a rebuttal (besides, say, True Grit) you can have at the ready:

Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941) Dudley Nichols' adaptation of the 1939 Geoffrey Household novel that begins with a sure-fire set-up: a big game hunter, Captain Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon), travels to Berchtesgaden to shoot Adolf Hitler right in the Berghof with a long-range rifle. He "takes the shot," but then, on second thought loads a bullet into the chamber...too late. He's discovered, taken prisoner and tortured for information by Major Quive-Smith (George Sanders, at his most impenetrably cold). The Major wants the Captain to admit that his intent was to kill Der Fuhrer (something he understands being an avid sportsman himself) and sign a confession to that effect, saying that he was doing it for the British government.  Thorndike refuses, is beaten, then dumped over a cliff to make his death appear an accident.

But Thorndike survives, and makes his way back to England, barely ahead of his Nazi pursuers. With the aid of a cockney lass, Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett), he manages to elude his pursuers, going, literally, underground by living in a makeshift cave and living off the land. But a cave has one drawback—it only has one exit, and this proves to be a weakness in Thorndike's cat-and-mouse with the Nazis.

It's a corker of a story, told with the visual paranoia that Lang excelled at. It's one long chase that finally goes elementally one-on-one. Where Nichols diverges from Household (aside from actually naming the dictator the author's anonymous hunter aims for, no doubt with the approval of the director, a German exile*) is in a neat insertion of a "woman's part," through the extended English city section, which becomes a deus ex machina for the final confrontations. "Jerry Stokes" was a Nichols creation, it being thought that giving Thorndike a visible love interest for the audience to identify with, would more humanize Thorndike and his quest.  "Jerry" has her origins in the book, but was only suggested. Nichols, Lang, and Bennett made flesh what Household only used as a back-story.   

Rogue Male (Clive Donner, 1976) BBC film of the Household novel that keeps the original more in its sights. Where Man Hunt is urban, has a love interest, and is quite light-hearted at times, Rogue Male is more to the point, quite brutal (the shots of Peter O'Toole's Thordyke after being beaten to a bloody pulp are tough to watch) and extends the cave scenes, making them much more a part of the story (Pidgeon spends barely 20 minutes in the cave in Man Hunt) as they are in the book.

But it is the character of Thorndyke where the two most diverge—Pidgeon's captain does what he does to survive. That's certainly true of O'Toole's characterization (it has to be!), but one also gets the sense that this hunter prefers life in a cave to one in the aristocracy. Any hint of romance is purely prologue, giving an ethereal quality to the unnamed woman, that O'Toole merely suggests with a melancholy cast of his eyes. Written with 20/20 hindsight by Frederic Raphael, the film is far more political than either the book or first film could ever hope to be at the time they were written, given the historical perspective nearly forty years can bring. Smart, intelligent, unwavering, the BBC version of Household's novel is an adaptation worthy of the anonymous Hunter.

The Lang version is more stylish and romantic, but Donner's TV-version has the novel down cold. O'Toole once stated that it is the favorite of all films.

* This supposedly worried 20th Century Fox exec Darryl F. Zanuck, as well as The Breen Office, as America, at the time, was neutral in the European War, not entering the fray until the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Speculations in the Bond Market

So, who's your favorite actor who has played James Bond (if, in fact, you even give a rip about the series)?  It depends on a lot of factors, and a lot of it depends on the time factor.  There are some who say the first Bond you encounter is your favorite (this is not true for me, as my first Bond experience was On Her Majesty's Secret Service!), and I know a lot of Brits who prefer Roger Moore's Bond to all others, which seems odd to me.  I've also read that as you get older, the first James Bond younger than you has a hard time being accepted (Again, that's not true for me).

Then there's the Bond you're talking about; are you a fancier of Ian Fleming's "book" character or of the one portrayed in the movies?  They differ.  The book Bond is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud professional with a penchant for fast and easy living, owing to his inevitable expiration date.  The movie Bond knows-all, tells-all, is a gourmand, a sartorial snob, and quips...a lot.  He has no expiration date.  The book Bond had a fussy housekeeper.  The movie Bond is the fussy house-keeper.  The book Bond not only smoked and heavily imbibed, but was known to have a benzedrine habit before going out "in the field."  The movie Bond has dropped all but the watery vodka martini's.

Do you see Bond as the cruel-mouthed, scarred resembler of Hoagy Carmichael (right), or is your Bond so male-model-fresh that you can't imagine ever having his perfect nose broken in a scrap?

The Broccoli kids at Eon Productions, Bond's film maker, have maintained their father's code that it's not the actor that audiences come to see, it's Bond (this was useful in salary negotiations).  And one need only look at the track record of each actor's non-Bond films to bear that out.  But in their time in the gun-harness, they had the world's attention, whether they wanted it or not. 

Everyone has their favorite Bond, if they have one.  I thought I'd do my own personal ranking of the actors and their interpretations of the characters,* as factored in today (tomorrow may be different).  Everytime such a list, and my reasons, have appeared in various places, they've generated controversy. 

This one will be no different.

From least to best:


George Lazenby: There are some who consider Lazenby's one film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service the best Bond film.  Especially "shippers." I might agree. But the one thing that keeps it from being a classic (and fronting Bond retrospectives rather than being an after-thought) is the black hole in the center sucking the thing. George Lazenby is a bit of a stiff as Bond, going through Connery's motions, trying to look casual. And God knows, director Peter Hunt uses all his editing wizardry and over-dubbing to try to improve his performance. But, he might have taken the "blunt instrument" description too literally by playing Bond as a block of wood. He has two really good scenes: the "those girls" confrontation with Blofeld (Telly Savalas) and the post ski-chase confrontation with his boss, "M" (Bernard Lee). But, the rest of the time he's lost at sea, looking unsure or overly confident. The man shouldn't have been put in the position—he'd never acted before, while "the other feller" had done Shakespeare and already made his embarrassing moves in ten years of supporting film-roles. Lazenby's were front and center and bathed in neon for all the world to see. It was like he was set up to fail. 



Roger Moore: Moore never believed in Bond, but he loved the pay-check. He saw Connery's humorous take on the character and took it even further. In fact, when Moore roughs up a woman it seems really distasteful—he was much better at seducing (which was always a little too "instant" in the Moore Bonds, his era being marked by the producers relying on a "bond-formula" short-hand in the scripts). But, he was cool, collected, looked great in suits—even in India, extending the sartorial jokes, despite the age of bell-bottom tuxedos—hit his marks and smirked winningly. He's actually much better than he's been given credit for. He was the class "A" Brit, maintaining the Colonial Attitude even after the Empire had turned to dust and blown away. That seemed to be part of the joke, too—Moore walked around with an air of superiority through some of the world's dustiest hell-holes, looking elegant. A fine satiric point for an age cynical about spies and subterfuge...and Empire. But Moore's Bond was never Fleming's secret agent. Not when played for laughs.



Pierce Brosnan: If Brosnan had taken over after Moore, he might have continued in the same vein, cut by Remington Steele. But Tim Dalton buffered Moore and Brosnan with a more serious, more respectable Bond, and Brosnan, wisely, built on it, throwing in more elements of humor (which he could pull off with aplomb), while also turning Bond into a round-firing machine. Despite his male model looks, Brosnan did extraordinarily well, winning back Bond's popularity, and there are moments in each of his Bonds where he does something uniquely his own that I admire. But, he had a tendency to over-dramatize, and his insistence on making Bond more of a romantic weakened the character. A Bond made up of elements of his predecessors, ultimately Brosnan's Bond is a little dull and unmemorable, and...generic, his first film, Goldeneye, containing his best performance.  Want to see him at his best as an actor? The Tailor of Panama or The Ghost Writer.



Sean Connery: Yeah, yeah, I know. Sacrilege. Connery created the screen-Bond. He made Bond in his image and every actor has been chasing Connery's for years. But, I hew to Fleming's Bond, and as perfect as Connery is, he just ain't it. That was part of the humor that he and director Terence Young ("He should have played Bond" says Connery) brought to the role. The effete snob with the soft purr in the voice, and a lorry-driver's hooliganism combine to make Teflon-Bond, who may get a little dusty, a little smudged—only shaken, not stirred. Plus, the violence towards women grates, especially as it's played so jokily in Goldfinger and Thunderball, whirling women into the paths of black-jacks and bullets. The girls get slapped around in From Russia With Love and Diamonds Are Forever.  nd, really, isn't the barn-clinch from Goldfinger a rape (which...excuse me?..turns Pussy Galore "straight" and "good?"). Then, there's the sexual blackmail against the spa nurse in Thunderball. You could try to defend it as "the times," but the argument doesn't hold up against other acts of violence like, say, lynching.  Connery's Bond makes me cringe at times.  But, as someone wrote about him in "Total Film's" letters section, "There might be better Bonds, but he'll always be the alpha-wolf."  Just so. 




Timothy Dalton:  Maybe he's not as good as I remember him—there was some over-emoting on occasion, but you knew, when watching Dalton, that he'd read his Fleming, and made the huge actorly leap of making a 50's hero work in the 80's, even after 15 years of mocking the character through the "Less-is-Moore" years. I had worries about Dalton. Before Bond, he was king of the mini-series, the "male" lead, the chiseled pretty boy you couldn't believe had ever taken a blow to the face. But, Dalton roughed himself up for the role, threw out most of the one-liners, treated the character and the "out-there" situations as real—outlandish, but real (even his Bond can't believe some of them)—and added an element missing from Bond for many years: danger. Dalton's Bond worried you. At moments of stress, his Bond might go off the handle and pop a few innocents. His Bond got angry, could snap, and was a bit of a Byronic cad towards the ladies. Oh, he was civil, even romantic, but he'd lie like Connery's rug to get information. He was a stark contrast (and for me, a welcome change) from Moore, but, as it is apparent now, he was ahead of his time, and audiences couldn't make the transition. Brosnan would provide that, and from Dalton to Brosnan to Craig, the Bonds would build on each others' performances to strengthen the character.



Daniel Craig:  No, he doesn't look like Hoagy Carmichael...well, he does through the nose, but the face and hair are not Fleming's description. But, damn. Craig kind of nails it, right down to the dichotomy of Bond acting differently in front of his boss and then loosening up "in the field." Craig's "soccer-tough" of a Bond makes you believe in the foot-chases, the fast-thinking short-cuts, and the pit-bull-on-two-legs tenacity that has always made those extended chases probable. And, he's dangerous. He's the only Bond who kills the way the book Bond does, by strangling a man with his bare hands, gadgets be damned (one can imagine Craig in a "Q" scene, the way they used to be played, with an air of "What is this crap?"). His Bond is impetuous, diffident, an asshole at times, feeling his way through an investigation without trying to feel too much, drinking heavily (and actually suffering the effects), and keeping the sexual conquests to a manageable level. The squabbling bantering between Bond and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in Casino Royale was some of the best dialogue ever written for Bond, and certainly for the "Bond-girl," and reflected the book-Bond's annoyance with women "getting in the way" of the assignment. Craig's version is full of surprises, sometimes unpleasantly, and is the best thing in his movies, whether the script is good (Casino Royale) or bad (Quantum of Solace).  That's why I think he's the best Bond...today.

Who's your Bond? Take your shot.

* I've excluded the actors who've played Bond in the "non-canon" films outside of the Eon Productions Empire, those being the first Bonds of the first "Casino Royale" adaptations, Barry Nelson and David Niven, and Sean Connery's Bond in Never Say Never Again (although he's a bit closer to the book Bond's in it than his others—he drives a Bentley).

Spies (1928)

Spies (aka Spione, Fritz Lang, 1928) Based on a novel by his then-wife Thea von Harbou, who had collaborated with the director on his previous film, the more-famous being Metropolis, Spies is a proto-James Bond movie released back when that character's author-creator was a mere twenty years old. Here, agents, given numbers and their names taken away, hunt down the criminal masterminds hiding in plain sight as respected businessmen in Germany.

One such Captain of Industry is Haghi (Rudolph Kleine-Rogge*), who is a financier and is in charge of the huge Haghi Bank. But, his interests are more than just the compounded kind. A master of blackmail, and with a network of duplicitous agents scattered in high places, Haghi keeps track of the weaknesses of his account-holders, and uses them to his own end, infiltrating them in with the more established agents in various high-stakes plots: The Minister of Trade is assassinated from a moving car and condemning evidence is stolen right on the street; secret documents are lifted from the French Embassy in Shanghai; a murderer is saved from hanging to be used as an agent; and the wife (Hertha von Walther) of a prominent politico will have her opium habit exposed, if she does not obtain information about an upcoming treaty with Japan. The web of intrigue is intricate and spreads world-wide.

So, who's around to stop this seemingly endless series of espionage? The police are baffled and the government's Secret Service seems to be caught so flat-footed that they are openly mocked by the press. Why, intrepid Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch), Our Man on the Street as he's been working extremely undercover in the guise of an out-of-work vagrant (which may explain why there's so much hanky-panky going on in the upper strata of Society). He is approached for, and is rather reluctant to accept, the assignment of finding out who the criminal mastermind is behind all these capital crimes. He is initially reluctant, but that may only be a ploy to uncover the enemy agent in the SS ranks, which he exposes right under the chief's nose. Even the Secret Service is not out of reach of the crime network's clutches.

Agent 326—Our Man on the Street

But, Haghi learns of the agent's mission to hunt him down (don't ask how) and enlists one of his own to serve as a "honey trap" for 326, the Russian spy Sonya Baranilkowa (Gerda Maurus), to seduce and distract the agent, and, if necessary, eliminate him. Convinced of his anonymity, 326 never suspects when he comes to the rescue of a distraught woman on the run from the police, that he might be in the process of being set up. All he knows is there's a beautiful woman in trouble and he comes to the rescue.

...but he cleans up really nice.

But, even the best-laid plans of a criminal genius like Haghi's can go awry; he doesn't count on 326** and Sonya actually falling in love after she throws herself at him. This, of course, complicates things—for both sides. Meanwhile, 326, in order to protect Sonya, must keep her hidden from the police (which he knows) and away from Haghi (which he has no clue). But, what he also doesn't suspect is that Sonya has been ordered to betray him, and will do so if Haghi uses his considerable persuasive tactics against her.  

The evil Haghi is not all he appears...

There are complications involving a lover's misunderstanding, an elaborate death-trap for our hero involving a train and an abandoned car in a tunnel, as well as further blackmail schemes, more plots, betrayals, deaths, and a raid on Haghi's secret headquarters inside his bank, as well as one elaborate twist you won't see coming that ends on a darkly ironic note—the sort of not-completely happy ending that Lang preferred (when the studios weren't interfering).

The Haghi Bank and its intricate series of paths, much like a prison.

It's an elaborate puzzle of a movie, with set-pieces that would inspire the humorous intrigue of Alfred Hitchcock in his films (in Germany, Britain, and America), and set a path for sensationally elaborate hokum that would become a tradition of all but the most staid spy films. Lang was a pioneer of such over-the-top fantasy. In his films, threats come from beyond the frame out of nowhere, and the trouble to which the villains go to eliminate any interference would make any normal (evil or non-evil) businessman go running for budget projections.*** At some point, audiences wouldn't be blamed for asking (as they do now) "why don't you just shoot him?" but, even then, the entertainment of the thing keeps the question from burbling to the surface, delaying the logic until after the movie is over. One doesn't want to be a spoil-sport, no matter how much of a megalomaniac one might have the potential to be. The evil plans are ornate, and probably wouldn't pass any forensics examination or test of logic or practicality. They simply are fun (although e-vil) and impressive in the sort of imagery that distracts from the absurdity of the logistics (some of this might be owed to the stunt-work of American silents that were so popular with audiences; there's not an awful lot separating the action work of Lang, and say, Buster Keaton, other than intent). And so, the spy-movie, the thriller runs a long, circuitous and often bumpy line from the early comedians (including Chaplin and Lloyd) through Lang and Hitchcock and on to Bond and Bourne and beyond; it's a century long chase that spans the projected image in an attempt to capture the imaginations of the audience.

The film is presented below.

* Klein-Rogge was Lang's always dependable villain, playing the evil inventor Rotwang in Metropolis, and in a series of films, Lang's master criminal Dr. Mabuse.

** We never do find out his name, although his street-character's name is Hans Pockzerwinski (now, there's a name people will forget quickly)

*** As we all know now, Evil has no budget.  And if they did, they don't care going OVER budget.

The Imitation Game

Performing a Blood-Soaked Calculus
or
"We're Going to Break an Unbreakable Nazi Code and Win the War."  "Oh."

Alan Mathison Turing was finally awarded a posthumous pardon for "crimes of indecency" by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013, 59 years after his apparent suicide by allegedly eating (in a morbid reflection of his favorite childhood fairy tale) a cyanide-laced apple. He had been a year into taking a chemical castration drug after being convicted of acts of homosexuality, at the time illegal in England.

If he had failed in his activities during the second World War, it is very likely that a Nazi court would have done the same thing, albeit executing Turing. But, instead, a grateful surviving nation turned on the one man whom Winston Churchill stated "made the single biggest contribution to Allied Victory"—the breaking of the Nazi Enigma codes with which they encoded radioed messages to its forces. And, in peace and freedom, I'm typing on the keyboard of a descendant of one of Turing's constructs created during that endeavor. 

The Imitation Game is the first film that can actually say it is "based on the True Story"* of those code-breaking efforts—kept secret until 1973** at the dawn of the new age of computers.

It is 1951, and there is a flurry amid military, intelligence and academic circles: Alan Turing's apartment has been burgled. The police come to investigate (in the form of Inspector Rory Kinnear) and discover nothing has been stolen, and Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is dismissive. The detective finds this suspicious—usually crime-victims want "bobbies" around investigating; that Turing doesn't means he has something to hide.

No shit, Sherlock. Alan Turing has more things to hide than you could shake an Official Secrets Act at. And your first clue is that he gets a lot of respect...but you can never find out why. "Paying attention?" Turing asks at the beginning of the film. "Good. If you're not paying attention, you'll be missing things."

It's 1939. Turing applies for a job at Bletchley Radio manufacturing. The person conducting the interview is Cmdr Denniston (Charles Dance), who takes an almost instant dislike to the humorless, arrogant, socially-unskilled young man sitting in front of him who states he really doesn't want the job, but he wants the challenge. Denniston opens the door to escort the creep out and Turing says one word: "Enigma." And everything stops.

It won't be the last time that happens.

Turing is hired.  From the start, he's an irritant. While the others in the group are trying to break codes, tackling the problem head on, Turing is designing a machine to do the process. To the others, he's doing nothing but wasting time. But to Turing, that's exactly the problem he's trying to tackle. The Germans change their codes at midnight; first messages appear at 6am—meaning the code is only good for 18 hours, and then is changed. The process begins again—daily—to break the code out of 159 million million million possible variations. Turing's solution is not to find the needle in the haystack, but to eliminate the haystack. To do that, he goes over everyone's head to secure the funds to make his decoding machine (not historically accurate, but it seems the filmmakers intention is to show Turing as a particularly nettling outcast, as opposed to an idiosyncratic obsessive), which vexes his superiors and annoys his peers. The siphoning of resources and man-hours in an all-or-nothing boondoggle makes Turing the target of all sorts of invective—except for the person of Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong, in an especially focused performance) of MI6, who seems to not only condone, but encourage the creation of the machine, which Turing calls "Christopher."

Knightley, Strong and Cumberbatch:
Sounds like a '60's folk trio...

Menzies also encourages Turing's recruitment activities, which produces an unexpected dividend, a mathematician named Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley, in a restrained—for her—very British performance that only reveals any negative emotion, specifically, through her eyes), who becomes Turing's closest confidante and co-conspirator, as well as his strongest bridge to getting along with his co-workers.***  Cumberbatch is charmingly daft in an unpleasant way, showing a vulnerability that evokes sympathy, but survivors of Bletchley Park describe Turing as not such an insufferable "Sheldon Cooper"-type, but as someone who, though he had eccentricities, was not without humor or charm, but never let anyone suspect he was not a genius.

That's a distraction. But the best thing about The Imitation Game is its portrayal of the world of secrets as being a very (very) complicated place. For once the code is cracked (I'm not giving away any secrets here, myself—the Nazis did lose the war), there comes the complicated issue of what to do with that knowledge. If the Nazis ever suspected that their unbreakable code was compromised, it would be as bad as never cracking it at all; a new system would be created and the allies would be back to the designing board, trying to crack a new code system.

And that's the moral quandary facing the code-breakers and strategists during World War II. Yes, you may know what the enemy is planning. But, to act on that information stopping their efforts and potentially saving thousands of lives would only alert the enemy to their vulnerability. At that point, the worth of cracking the code becomes nil, and so battles must be chosen, plans thwarted through misinformation and sabotage, by any means other than letting the enemy know that you know. At that point, World War II became a secret war fought on two fronts: on the field of battle and the back-rooms, reading the reports and calculating the costs and choosing the least destructive result.

The code-breakers saved incalculable lives...because there's no way of knowing how many would have been saved...or lost...if the cracking of Enigma was exposed.

That horrific reality informs the final stages of The Imitation Game as the battle must continue, not on moral grounds, but on logical ones. Even the purest of efforts can be sullied. Even the black and white of 1's and 0's can be compromised to stark shades of gray and crimson. Reality blurs and bleeds. And the quest of The Imitation Game—to determine whether a correspondent is human or machine—may be clear in theory, but questionable in reality.

His Memorial plaque in Manchester reads:
Father of Computer Science,
Mathematician, Logician
Wartime Codebreaker,
Victim of Prejudice

The statue to Turing at the Bletchley Park Museum.

* Another film, Enigma (2001) told a highly fictionalized story with a script written by Tom Stoppard, directed by Michael Apted (and produced by Lorne Michaels and Mick Jagger).

** Actually, the British efforts didn't become known in detail until 1974.  The Polish team of cryptographers wanted their part in the process known and so one of them published in 1973.  Is it "indecorous" to suggest that as these men were reaching the end of their lives they wanted the real story told, despite the intentions of their states' secrets mandates?  Britain released a number of documents in 2011.

*** Example: when fellow code-breaker Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) hands Turing a way to increase "Christopher's" speed, he replies "That's not an entirely completely terrible idea," she interprets: "That's 'Alan' for 'thank you'."

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

You Don't Know Jack (Ryan)
or
Remember Your Trade-craft and You'll Be Fine.

Tom Clancy's most-read hero, Jack Ryan, has been all manner of things in the books—economics student, CIA analyst, Deputy Director of the CIA, and President of the United States (Hey! It could happen—especially in a Clancy novel!). When asked who should play Ryan in the movies, Clancy would answer jovially "Me!" and then demur to the latest Hollywood hunk, as long as he wasn't a liberal.

Ryan was Clancy's fantasy-ego and he'd regularly grouse about the movies made from his books (what authors don't, but when Clancy was asked to do commentaries for the DVD releases, he was always entertaining, enlightening, and for the most part, charitable). Alec Baldwin darkened his hair and manned up to play Ryan in The Hunt for Red October (showing off his proclivities for mimicry—his Connery imitation is hilarious). When Baldwin made a sequel tougher to negotiate, the producers turned to Harrison Ford, an actor always good for holding up a tent-pole, to do the next two. Then, came time to reboot the franchise with a younger actor, Ben Affleck took over in The Sum of All Fears and re-tread some of the same Ryan-ground from the first movie. Now, approximately twelve years after TSOAF, the Clancy-verse gets its second reboot with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit as Chris Pine portrays Ryan, going even further back with more depth into Ryan's past.***

Sample Dialogue: "You Americans think you're direct. Perhaps you're just rude."
"You Russians think of yourselves as poets.  Maybe you're just touchy."
Oooh, sna...wait...WHAT?

The Clancy movies always tread a weird circuitous path, trying to remain true to the author's ideas of "us versus them" while neutering it with a PC-view of geo-politics; it may be Clancy's world, but we still have to live in it and if we can avoid a pipe-bomb up the wazoo, so much the better. So, rather than any real threats (jihadists, for example), we're threatened by already-chastened toothless groups that SOUND like threats like neo-Nazi's, white supremacists, Irish terrorists, Russian capitalists, and who knows, maybe vegans or a temperance league, now and then. Pity Jack Ryan, though. He just wanted to be an economist and before you know it, he's in Afghanistan breaking his back during a helicopter crash, but rescuing fellow soldiers despite that. Even with some crushed vertebrae, pretty soon he's sprinting across Moscow, fighting very large assassins in small spaces, driving cars into other vehicles and hanging off about-to-detonate vans in the streets of Manhattan. One wonders with all that activity on all that reconstructive surgery there's isn't a screw loose somewhere.

Maybe it's me for thinking that a Tom Clancy movie with no basis in Tom Clancy would make a good movie. Now, granted, I'm not the biggest fan of his work, finding him technically gee-whizzy, but his characterizations flat; he's got the spread-sheets and the blue-prints, but his characters are stamped on cardboard. He's a step below Michael Crichton in the character development department. That's where the movies (at least, initially) did Clancy a service in translation. The actors fleshed out the intel and even offered some intrigue in between the jargon. Here, there's not much of that as much as back-story, and a constant harping on Ryan's domestic issues in conflict with his secret duties. The actors try very hard—Pine more than necessary, Keira Knightley does as much as she can in a "victim" role, and Kevin Costner is suitably unreadable as Ryan's boss-mentor-cheerleader.

Kenneth Branagh directs (and acts the chief villain, a Russian capitalist specializing in insider-trading) and seems content to keep the action moving swiftly and the interiors filled with negative space and not much else. Gone are the days of the ingenuity of his Shakespeare adaptations and scruffy curiosities like Dead Again and Peter's Friends. JR:SR is all about the architecture and how things move through them, then when things get rough they switch to second-unit mode where Vic Armstrong (as he was for the battle scenes in Branagh's feature debut Henry V) is in charge. Armstrong is one of the best in the business, but, he seems to be falling victim to the current trend of action film-making—to make it as incomprehensible as possible. Broken back aside, there are absurdities going on here that would strain credulity, if one could fathom just what was going on, and determine where people were in relation to those events. There's some lip-service given to GPS tracking, but most of the time, the action feels a little lost and chaotic to no good point other than to convey chaos. These things can be done better and Armstrong has done them better in the past. Everything about this one seems diminished, as far as scope, reach and execution, but it may satisfy those looking for a diversion or for fans of the participants. If you're not looking too closely, Branagh's Jack IV is okay.  But it's no Henry V.

 Jacks or Better to Open: Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin

* Interestingly, Ryan joins the Marines after the events of 9-11, which was only a few months before the premiere of The Sum of All Fears. 

** One should also mention Ryan's doctor-wife portrayed by in order Gates McFadden, Anne Archer, Bridget Moynahan, and now, Keira Knightley.