Patriot Games

As I mentioned in my previous review for The Hunt For Red October, for a long time Patriot Games was my favorite of the Jack Ryan films. While that opinion has drifted a bit more towards the prior film as I've matured, I still do enjoy this film a great deal. As a follow-up to the previous film, it is a darker and more intense film, but also accomplishes what it set out to be, more of a showcase of the Jack Ryan character and his family.

Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) is visiting London with his wife Cathy (played by Anne Archer) and daughter Sally (played by Thora Birch) when they stumble into the middle of an attack on Royal family member Lord Holmes (played by James Fox) and his wife and child by a radical faction of the IRA. Jack runs into the middle of the attack, taking out two of the attackers and incapacitating one as the remaining attackers flee. The incapacitated attacker is Sean Miller (played by Sean Bean) and one of the dead terrorists is Sean's younger brother. Distraught, Sean swears revenge on Ryan. However, with Sean Miller in custody and his compatriots seemingly on the run, Jack Ryan is confident that it's over. However, a daring prison break while Miller is being transported to jail changes things and upon convincing the faction leader Kevin O'Donnell (played by Patrick Bergin), makes a strike on the Ryan family back home in the United States, injuring both Cathy and Sally in the process. Enraged, Jack Ryan returns to his former mentor Vice Admiral James Greer (played by James Earl Jones) to resume his job at the CIA, determined to put an end to Sean Miller and his cronies once and for all.  

Phillip Noyce picked up the directing reins for this film when John McTiernan was unable to return and is well suited to this film's stronger thriller aspects. Working from a script by Peter Iliff and Donald E. Stewart, the film captures the essence of Tom Clancy's novel (even if Clancy himself famously disagreed and asked his name be taken off the film, which always baffled me because aside from a more streamlined finale, the movie is fairly faithful to the source novel). Noyce does a great job crafting a riveting thriller from the attack on Lord Holmes at the beginning of the film to the attempted hits on the Ryan family to the suspenseful finale at the end of the film. Yet one of the most riveting and memorable scenes of the film is when Ryan and his colleagues are watching live satellite footage of a SAS strike on the suspected training camp of Sean Miller's faction. Watching it play out is chilling, especially when one of the men in the room casually confirms a killing on screen while drinking a cup of coffee. It's a moment like that in this movie that has really stuck with me. Then to finish it off, the film has one of my all time favorite James Horner scores, with these wonderful celtic flourishes that would re-occur again and again in his scores, notably in both Braveheart  and Titanic. 

Harrison Ford took over the role of Jack Ryan when Alec Baldwin either couldn't return due to a scheduling conflict or over disagreements with the producers. Either way, I feel this is one area where we traded up. As much as I enjoyed The Hunt for Red October, Ford is the superior Ryan to me. He is such a skilled performer and able to convey so much with a simple glance, such as in the aforementioned training camp strike. Sean Bean makes for a frightening adversary in the film, conveyed his characters wrath and grief so convincingly. Anne Archer does well as Cathy Ryan in what is probably a fairly thankless role, who spends much of the movie reacting to the things around her, but she does have good chemistry with Harrison Ford and along with Thora Birch at her most precocious as their daughter create a warm family unit the audience can't help but root for. James Earl Jones is the sole returning cast member from the previous film and once again manages to accomplish so much with his few scenes in the film in a way that only James Earl Jones can. Samuel L. Jackson makes a memorable appearance here as Robby, Jack Ryan's friend and fellow teacher at the Annapolis Naval Academy.

Patriot Games holds up for me as a superior action thriller and a great first outing for Harrison Ford in the role of Jack Ryan. It's one I've always enjoyed since I first saw it way back when and only helped solidify my interest in this series of films, even as they continued to be rebooted. For this one though, it stands along with the one before it and the one immediately following it as my favorites in the series.