Patriot Games ★★★½
THE CIA versus the IRA. Sometimes the idea behind a good movie can be that simple.
No doubt Tom Clancy’s novel Patriot Games includes complex examination of the political and military machinations that would be involved in such a conflict.
But Australian director Phillip Noyce, by design or not, stripped everything down for his 1992 screen adaptation to focus primarily on action and the personal clash between two men.
It’s a film that looks expensive, stylish and conventional, but is also prepared to dive into the dirtier and darker side of human emotions.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from a deep film. But the short amount of screen time spent on examining the commitment, dedication and passion of both sides, however misguided it may be, is well used.
This is the second of four films that have featured Clancy’s CIA analyst hero, Jack Ryan. The general consensus is that The Hunt for Red October (1990) starring Alec Baldwin as Ryan, is the best film, but Harrison Ford is the best Ryan.
Ford was brought into Patriot Games at the last minute after Baldwin pulled out. Ford backed it up with Clear and Present Danger in 1994. For the record, the others have been Ben Affleck in The Sum of all Fears (2002) and Chris Pine in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit in 2014. (I’m not counting the television series)
I will revisit Red October at some stage, but for the moment I’m all in with Patriot Games being the best. This is a hidden treasure/guilty pleasure for me. I just love the premise of pitting the technological might of the CIA against the centuries’ old, emotion-based Irish Republican Army.
Ford is perfectly cast as the character who pivots between the two approaches. While the CIA as an organisation struggles to understand and combat the IRA’s stun-and-run approach, the personal conflict Ryan is forced into with impetuous IRA enforcer Sean Bean helps him understand where the organisation is vulnerable.
Four great action set-pieces anchor the film – a machine-gun attack on a member of the Royal family in broad day-light in central London that fails due to Ryan’s personal intervention; a rocket attack and series of executions during a prison break; a revenge attack on Ryan’s family on a crowded American freeway; and the final night assault by a team of night vision-wearing assassins on Ryan’s family home culminating in a fist-fight onboard a speed boat.
Throw in one of the first screen depictions of a deadly night-time CIA assault on an IRA training camp in Africa, depicted on a Washington board-room video screen in heat vision, and you can sense why the film is such a pleasure for action fans.
Add a supporting cast of Patrick Bergin, Richard Harris, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, James Fox and Thora Birch, that does an amazingly good job of maximising their character impact.
There is one problem with the film. I absolutely hate three or four scenes between Ryan and his wife, played by Anne Archer. For some reason they are terribly forced, staged and over-acted and one of these scenes even sneaks into the film’s final moment.