The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1989) We're grudging fans of Alec Baldwin in the BXC household, so every so often it's nice to go back and see "serious actor" Baldwin before he stretched his comic chops (an opportunity made common by this film's seeming omnipresence on cable channels these days). "The Hunt for Red October" was a dry-as-a-bone Tom Clancy novel based on a long-rumored incident involving a Russian nuclear submarine accident that Clancy turned into a cat-and-mouse game between a defecting Russian sub commander, and the American and Russian fleets in the North Atlantic. In the book, the action was sometimes intriguing, but the characters were non-existent, right down to the motivations of Captain Ramius, and the novel's Clancy-stand-in-hero Jack Ryan.

Producer Mace Neufeld (who must have had the patience of a saint given his long-term producing relationship with the late Clancy) turned it into a first-class film of intrigue top-heavy with male actors (by my count the only females are two stewardesses, Gates —Star Trek's "Dr. Crusher"—McFadden as Mrs. Ryan, and the kid who plays Ryan's daughter). So, here's the run-down: Baldwin, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance (making the most of a great part), Richard Jordan, Joss Ackland, Stellan Skarsgard, Peter Firth, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Curry, Fred Thompson, plus comedian Rick Ducommun and I swear I see Michael Biehn in the helicopter scene. And as the man everybody talks about, Sean Connery as the Scottishly-accented Lithuaninan Comdr. Ramius.*

It all works, as a spy/adventure story, as a detective story, a military exercise, and a submarine movie...and a character piece. Nobody comes out and says anything about their feelings, but actions define the characters, and with all the sub-time, there's a lot of celluloid of people standing around talking..and for the most part it's good functional talk that propels the movie along. Plus, you'll come away with a gloss of submarine tactics, of sonar capacities, the strategies of "arming" torpedoes, and a healthy respect for the difficulties of landing a jet-aircraft on a carrier during bad weather.** 

Respect also for Baldwin, who managed to make a human being out of the cypher of Jack Ryan through the force of his own personality--his Ryan is something of a geek, like Ben Affleck's later interpretation--and proved himself an adept for actor imitations (nice skewering of Thompson and Connery there, Alec) Plus, a crisp snap to the brim for suggesting and making good on the overhead shot of Ryan cutting his tether from a helicopter to gain entry to an American sub during a violent storm, and looking UP at the camera to make sure we all know it's actually him (pre-CGI) doing the stunt.

There was minimal CGI involved—and in fact, due to budget constraints, the filming of the underwater scenes were as low-tech as you could get—suspended model shots of subs were puppeteered through underwater landscapes filmed in a dry warehouse filled with smoke. Crude particle and wave generation was all that was needed to complete the image. But it's indicative of the back-to-basics approach to The Hunt for Red October--an old-fashioned sea-hunt that satisfies.

* The script, by Donald E. Stewart and Larry Ferguson (who also wrote himself a good part in it) is augmented by dialog commissioned by Connery from one of his favorite writers at the time, John Milius, his director in The Wind and the Lion, and Milius provided him some lovely chewable dialog throughout the thing, as in...this scene. 

** But my favorite moment in the movie is a brilliant stroke--the smooth transition in dialog from Russian to English as Firth's Political Officer reads a passage from a bible owned by Ramius' late wife: the camera moves in on Firth reading the passage--Revelation 16:15-17--(in Russian) and stops on one commonly-pronounced word--"Armageddon"--and when the camera begins to pull back, he continues...in English. It's a neat trick, perfectly strategized and played...like so much of the movie.

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.