Clear and Present Danger (dir. Phillip Noyce, 1994)
So James Earl Jones is back as Admiral Greer, only he finds he is dying of pancreatic cancer, and asks Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) to replace him in the White House as director of intelligence. Ryan is even more of a stale pencil-pusher in Danger, and there’s an amusing scene where he is unsure as to which kind of necktie to wear. I like an action hero who is also something of a stuffed shirt. He is capable, but still awkward and nerdy like many of us.
The story, as brief as I can put it: When a drug cartel member is killed in Colombia, it is revealed that the U.S. government may have had a connection to him; he was the president’s friend. And while it looks like the president (Donald Moffatt) may be illegally pursuing his friend’s killer – with the aide of his slippery sidekick Ritter (a sublime Henry Czerny) and his stern hard-decisions man Cutter (Harris Yullin) – it begins to look like he is also waging an illegal war using a team of well-trained SEALS (working abroad, and headed by Willem Dafoe). The Colombians (represented by Miguel Sandoval and Joaquim de Almeida), meanwhile, may also be blackmailing or bribing people in the U.S. government, all under the nose of the investigating CIA.
The best scene in the movie: When Jack Ryan figures out what’s going on, and that Ritter is involved. He uses computers (a novelty in 1994) to track Ritter’s actions, trying to incriminate him. The following confrontation is awesome. There are several amazingly huge explosions during the war, and a final confrontation wherein Jack Ryan talks to the president, screaming “How dare you sir!”
There has always been a small amount of cynicism bubbling under the surface of the Jack Ryan movies, but it doesn’t become so obvious until this complex little film about governmental malfeasance. Although this is a pertinent detail: the Berlin Wall fell since the last film was made, Communism largely crumbled, and spy shenanigans stopped being all about The Other and more about looking inward. Think of something like “The X-Files” in this regard. The conspiracies were no longer being perpetrated by an enemy, but by the government itself. Pop entertainment reflected the free-floating governmental paranoia at the time. Clancy’s book may have pre-dated the fall of the USSR, but the movie is a salient comment on up-to-date politics.
Complex, funny, and timely, I love Clear and Present Danger, and declare it to be the best in the series.
Be sure to come back next week, as the Jack Ryan series will try its first and second proper reboots with the post-9/11 examination The Sum of All Fears, and the brand new Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Until then, stay paranoid.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
