CHRIS PINE IN JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT

Stopping the Russians again

Branagh's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is a glossy, polished, high-energy movie with the engaging lead of Chris Pine, a "shadow recruit" of an A-list action star himself. But it's a knockoff of a knockoff. Tom Clancy's basic Jack Ryan template is unsophisticated to begin with. It's had some good stars -- Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck -- but as a movie source (in David Denby's words) it's a "property" -- not the "franchise" Bond and Bourne are. And Clancy is dead, so a couple of scriptwriters, Adam Cozad and David Koepp, just made up this unconvincing story. Why would Branagh, who began directing with Shakespeare, settle for such writing?

First the 9/11 card is waved at us, and it inspires a young brilliant Ryan, doing a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics, to join the Marines and get shot out of a helicopter, after a little football chatter, in Afghanistan. A doctor says if he isn't operated on within an hour, he'll never walk again. No worries. With the coaching, then romance of Keira Knightly (known here as Cathy Muller), a pre-med working as a physical therapist, Jack goes rapidly from hardly being able to get up off the floor, he's in such pain, to running high speed down the streets of Moscow, where the main action transpires. Hey presto! A decade has passed, but we've hardly noticed.

Denby is also right when he says Branagh has turned into "a speed freak." The passage of time is simply omitted. Therefore it's in the blink of an eye that Kevin Costner, playing Thomas Harper CIA superspy, who poses as a naval commander, has recruited Jack to work for a financial firm on Wall Street so he can watch for money transfers of terrorist organizations. Before you have time to ask how that would work, he's spotted that his company's Russian partner has hidden a lot of accounts trading in dollars. And I don't exactly remember how we find this out, but Kenneth Branagh, sporting dark suits and a bad Russian accent as Viktor Cherevin, mastermind of a Kremlin scheme (Koepp and Coazd apparently channeling a very retro version of Clancy) plans to carry out a 9/11-worthy terrorist action in the States and immediately thereafter execute large money deals that will bring down the US economy. But won't that be pretty hard on Russia's economy too? Yes, well, the answer to that is, it will hurt China more.

Oh but let's not dwell on such petty details. It turns out now Jack is Harper's choice to leave Wall Street and check up on his company's Russian partner (Branagh), who first tries to have him killed by a Ugandan heavy in his ultra-posh modern Moscow hotel suite (an intense sub-Bourne hand-to-hand battle ensues, which the Ugandan loses), then simply explains he has just sold all the suspicious dollar holdings, so they're not around to be inspected any more.

This might tend to stall a less accelerated story, but Cathy Muller has unexpectedly shown up. How does she know what hotel Jack's at, since he's been hiding from her his CIA mission? But why bother with such little matters! She's there, and she gets used as kind of bait for the evil Viktor Cherevin. Jack objects to Cathy's agreeing to this and asks to speak to her privately, whereupon Harper utters the immortal line, "No, you may not: this is geopolitics, not couples therapy," getting us out of that complication.

One trouble indeed is that Jack and Cathy have too little face time. The relationship between Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Branagh's last movie was more interesting -- in fact charming -- compared to this hasty match.

Cherevin is a toned-down Bond villain. He wants to destroy the world, but in a low-keyed sort of way. He's sort of creepy, but it turns out he just has liver disease (spotted by Cathy, for which he calls her "a brilliant doctor"), so he's slightly yellow and has weird veins on the back of his hands. He's getting shots -- he beat up a nervous orderly who bungled the job -- and pops pills all the time. He wears dark suits. He lives in ultra-modern surroundings, which the film scholar Thom Anderson has pointed out are linked by Hollywood with evil. But these restrained touches don't make Cherevin seem real. They just make one long for the flamboyance of a full-fledged Bond heavy. It's funny for a film about world domination to be so modest and understated.

The cinematography of the film and its look are of a piece. They impress and distract (like the loud music) but don't satisfy. The big Panavision widescreen is choked with a lot of closeups, and the establishing shots are not there in Haris Zambarloukos' images, except for occasional panoramas of the "old" Moscow (pastry domes) and the "new" Moscow (hard-edged steel and glass). The set decorator Judy Farr has a proclivity for loud geometrical shapes, so the one for Cherevin's company logo is reproduced all over huge walls of his office, as wallpaper, with an unlikely dazzling op-art effect that's very distracting; moreover, Jack's Moscow hotel suite has the same dark, shiny look. They could be part of the same building -- not a good idea, in storytelling terms. The cinematographer has a proclivity for long faceted mirrors, which also are pretty, but again, too much of a sameness.

The speed isn't confusing, but it's a bit crazy, and the forward leaps never stop. Jack is battered and exhausted after saving Cathy from Cherevin's clutches and downloading major Russian secrets, yet he's instantly back on Wall Street, again Harper's central operative, now stopping the terrorist bombing from being carried out-- apparently by a single young Russian (Alec Utgoff). What happened to time? From minute-to-minute this a breathlessly suspenseful movie, and it provides some entertainment. But it's too much just a lot of familiar plot elements rewoven with nothing strikingly new.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, 105 mins., opened 17 January 2014 in the US; 23 Jan. in the UK.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.