28 Jan 2014 00:38:04
It's been more than 20 years since novelist Tom Clancy's super-spook Jack Ryan first made it into the movies, and over a decade since he last appeared on screen. Over the course of five films, he's been variously played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford (twice), Ben Affleck, and now Chris Pine, recently seen piloting the Starship Enterprise through JJ Abrams's teen-friendly galaxy. It was assumed that Pine would bring viewers too young to remember The Hunt for Red October or Patriot Games into the Ryan fold, but in America this series reboot has "skewed old", with more than a third of its opening weekend audience aged over 50. Which is bad news for the studio, but good news for those of us antiquated farts who quite like the idea of an old-fashioned cold war-inflected movie, albeit one with a modern online finance twist.
After recovering from a post-9/11 war wound, economist Jack Ryan is recruited by the CIA to keep a covert eye on sinister financial transactions. Spying a market irregularity, he heads to Russia where creepy Viktor Cherevin (director Kenneth Branagh, relishing his villainous role) is planning to wreak havoc on Wall Street. Can Jack hack the Russian computers before Viktor hacks Jack's girlfriend Cathy (Keira Knightley, holding her own against the boys – and an American accent – with ease)? The film may be formulaic, but Branagh handles the direction with clean, brisk, strokes; the central office-break setpiece is nicely nail-biting stuff, with the three leads playing cat and mouse to a tee, while Kevin Costner fires off a few old-school rounds from the balcony. Hardly earth-shattering, then, but efficient and entertaining nonetheless.
