Recensioni degli utenti

If I were to make a quick summary of this movie, it would be "a good, but not great, action flick." I don't think this movie was intended to be innovative, to be great, to be memorable. What it was intended to be was entertaining, and it lived up to this expectation.

Harrison Ford is the master of remaining as low-key as possible. He has had so many films where he can over-emphasize, over-dramatize, and simply over-act. Ford has the maturity to keep this from happening, and he does so again in this film. Ford is supported quite well with such actors/actresses as James Earl Jones (reprising his role as Greer from The Hunt for Red October), Samuel L. Jackson, and Anne Archer. For an action flick, acting is much above average.

It was also suspenseful...thrilling. I thought the ending had a nice build-up and climax. I realize this is different from the book's ending...but remember, these are two different visions...not the same one. This brings up a big point in movie-watching: Comparing a movie to a book is the worst thing you can do. They are two completely different genres. More importantly, as I said before, they are two different visions.

I'm not a big action fan. I used to be, but anymore most stories are the same. To this end I would say Patriot Games is fairly mainstream. However, it was always fun to watch and sometimes thrilling to watch. I'm also not a big Tom Clancy fan, but I've given the movies based off his books a shot because again they are different visions. The result is (at least with Patriot Games) a good film to watch on a Saturday night with a bowl of popcorn. Don't expect great things, but don't expect to be disappointed, either.

Rating: 7/10

Patriot Games is a more than serviceable thriller, perhaps a bit out of date when viewing it now, but still a very effective good against evil piece. The source material is so dense and intricate it was always going to be hard to condense that into a 2 hour movie but I feel the makers manage to keep it fleshy whilst making the respective characters interesting and watchable. The acting on show is more than adequate, Harrison Ford is great in the role of Jack Ryan, he manages to portray him as a sensitive family man who can step up to the plate when things get ugly, and Anne Archer is solid enough as the wife and mother caught up in the web of nastiness unfolding.

The baddies are led by the brooding Sean Bean who is a little under written, whilst Richard Harris is sadly underused, but the action set pieces make their mark and thankfully we get a riveting final reel that cements the steady ride we have under taken. It is formulaic to a degree, but that is OK if the combined efforts of all involved are spot on, and here they are, 7/10.

A faction of the IRA attempt to kidnap Lord William Holmes, a member of the British Royal Family who also happens to be a Government minister, but the crime is thwarted by the courageous actions of Jack Ryan, an American tourist in London with his family. During the ensuing scuffle, Ryan shoots dead one of the terrorists, Patrick Miller. Miller's elder brother Sean is jailed for his part in the attack, but is rescued by his comrades, and vows vengeance on Ryan, who is a former marine and CIA operative. When Ryan realises that Sean Miller is targeting his family he returns to work for the CIA to help with the fight against terrorism.

There are a number of fairly obvious goofs and plot holes. No member of the British Royal Family could serve as a Government minister, as they are constitutionally obliged to remain politically neutral. If a foreign citizen were being made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (one of the highest awards in the British honours system) he would be invited to a formal ceremony in Buckingham Palace to be knighted by the Queen in person. He would not be presented with the decoration in his own home by a junior member of the Royal Family. It seems unlikely that any Irish republican terror group would carry out an attack on American citizens on American soil, as to do so would risk losing the support their cause has long enjoyed among sections of the Irish-American community. As others have pointed out, it seems illogical for Ryan to take his family to their isolated summer home to get them away from Miller; doubtless the CIA could have found a safer location for them.

The film lacks the political implications of "Clear and Present Danger", Philip Noyce's next attempt to film a Tom Clancy thriller which involved Watergate-type misconduct by the President and his closest aides. (That film also starred Harrison Ford as Ryan). Despite the involvement of the IRA, "Patriot Games" makes no attempt to analyse the complexities of the Northern Ireland situation. The film also lacks any detailed characterisation. The moral divisions are straightforward- Ryan, his wife Cathy and his CIA colleagues are good and Miller and his gang are bad.

The film does, however, have a strong hero in Harrison Ford. Ford has always been good in the thriller genre, and gives another good performance here as Ryan, combining decency with a strong sense of intelligence. Anne Archer and Sean Bean are also good as Cathy and the villainous Miller. There is a good cameo from Polly Walker as Miller's glamorous but ruthless female associate Annette. Despite the occasional implausibilities of the plot, this is a tense and fast-moving thriller with some good action sequences. It is not Ford's best thriller (that must be either "Witness" or "The Fugitive"), but it is nevertheless a good one. 7/10

OK, so it has some plot holes, and I generally spend a good amount of time detailing for my husband the deviations from the novel (which are many, since Hollywood doesn't make many five-hour movies). And it's predictable and artless and has plenty of clichés. I make it a point not to read IMDB reviews for a movie until after I've written my own, but even so I can guess that this one has been torn apart on these points probably at least a dozen times. Now that that's over with, I'm going to admit that I like this movie. It feels like a tight thriller, good for those nights when I want entertainment with some minor complexity. I like to "go along for the ride", so to speak, even though I know how it ends. And going back to the first time I saw this, before I'd read the book, I remember being on the edge of my seat quite a bit.

Thora Birch does this film a lot of good. Her expressions and lines are quite well-acted, and she's cute without being syrupy. Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford; you either like him or you don't, and this movie isn't going to change your mind (I happen to like him).

Don't go renting this one if you want an artsy movie, or a beautiful movie, or a movie with a perfectly tight script. But if you can enjoy a film for simple entertainment value, and you like Harrison Ford ;), this is a good one for after the kids are in bed.

I can't say that I know much about Tom Clancy's novels or the character of Jack Ryan. Whether this is a honorable adaptation of the book I cannot say either, but as a thriller, Patriot Games struck me as weak. There are good performances from a sensational cast, a fair level of emotion to the story, and a nice score from James Horner, but the most obvious problem with Patriot Games, is that nothing much happens here.

While on holiday in England with his wife and daughter, Jack Ryan foils an IRA assassination attempt on one of the royal family. needless to say, Ryan becomes an automatic hero of Brittan, but shortly after returning home to Maryland, He is targeted by IRA terrorist Sean Miller for assassination, wanting revenge for the death of his brother. Can Ryan protect his family?

Harrison Ford plays a great Jack Ryan, no doubt there, but the movie is not as strong as he is. The story doesn't penetrate you in the way that a good thriller should. It is neither dramatic nor clever and is only mildly exciting. To say it is a bad film would be a huge over statement, it just needs work.

"Patriot Games" is an action movie like so many we have seen before, it's not a bad movie, it's an average one. I think it deserves 6.5 stars mainly because of the first half of the movie, which is interesting, but after that its quality diminish a lot.

The performances are OK, they are just what the film needed, the idea of the plot is interesting, but the biggest problem is that the movie last 15 minutes longer of what it was necessary.This movie would have been much better if it had only been a crime and thriller movie and not an action one.

The plot is about an ex CIA man Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) whose family is chased by a terrorist because Jack killed the terrorist's brother to save the life of an important British person.

"Patriot Games" is useful for killing time during one boring afternoon.

An older retired Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) is in England for a symposium of some nature. While there he witnesses an attempt on the life of a royal by some heavily armed terrorists. Jack goes into superspy mode, even at his advanced age, and takes out two terrorists while holding another at gunpoint.

This action of his makes him a hero in England but he becomes enemy number one to Sean Miller (Sean Bean), an extremist IRA member whose brother was killed by Jack Ryan. Anyone familiar with Sean Bean's cinematic history can figure out what happened to him.

I wasn't feeling this movie for two reasons and two reasons only:

1.) The sheer improbability of an aged, unarmed Jack Ryan getting involved in a terrorist shootout on foreign soil. Especially when his reasoning was "it just pissed me off." It pissed you off? You're a trained C.I.A. agent and former Marine but you can still be motivated to put your life in danger because it pissed you off.

2.) The sheer improbability of Sean Miller and friends being able to have the dearth of resources to commit a terrorist act in England and then safely get to America where they'd have the same resources to track down Jack Ryan and family. Is there no place they can't go?

Outside of these two crater sized pock marks the movie was good. It was a mix of investigative acumen, military technology, and combat skill. The movie was suspenseful as each side tried to stay one move ahead of the other like a high stakes chess match. There was a lot of maneuvering but it definitely was no game.

Clearly Alec Baldwin was too exhausted after his submarine adventure in 1990, so Harrison Ford picked up the mantle of "Jack Ryan" - now a former CIA operative who is on the UK on holiday with his family. Hardly have the titles ended before he is embroiled in an IRA attempt to kidnap "Lord Holmes" (James Fox), a distant cousin of the Queen Mother. Intervening, he kills one of the attackers who happens to be the younger brother of the surviving attacker "Sean" (they kept it simple for Mr Bean). Of course he is sprung from police custody via some dinghies near Tower Bridge and next thing "Ryan" and family are the new targets of this vengeful terrorist cell. What now ensues is a really dry thriller that plods along with little to make it stand out. There is an irony that the IRA man is played by an Englishman, but neither Richard Harris nor Samuel L. Jackson really make much impression on this politically simplistic revenge vehicle for a star who is far from his best. The perilous scenarios rather lurch from frying pan to fire, but never with much jeopardy - before an ending at sea that at least gave the pyrotechnics folks something to do. It's not Tom Clancy's best book, and is really only a passable watch on screen.

This is an outstanding thriller, a movie I have always enjoyed watching since it came out. Apparently a number of people also did since a few sequels followed featuring the main character ex-CIA analyst "Jack Ryan," played by Harrison Ford.

Sean Bean was excellent as the revenge-obsessed villain, a member of a "splinter group," as its labeled not really an IRA extremist, but one too out-of- control for any group. Ford is the man best able to stop him and the film is very interesting start-to-finish and smart enough not to overdo the violence. Suspenseful is probably the best word to describe the movie as Bean goes after Ford's family.

Anne Archer, as Ford's wife, along with the rest of the cast, actors such as Patrick Bergen, James Earl Jones, James Fox, Richard Harris and a young Thora Birch make this a well- acted movie.

This is simply one of the best thrillers I've ever seen and almost every scene is interesting.

Even after almost 30 years it is still absolutely worth seeing and entertaining. Harrison Ford in his heyday in a beautiful, straightforward thriller with no claim to reality. A bit like "96 Hours" in the 90s.

Let me say that I have only seen this one, "The Hunt for Red October", and "Clear and Present Danger". I enjoyed this one and Red October a good bit. Was not really crazy for "Clear and Present Danger", I just for some reason found it rather boring compared to the other two movies. I do not know why this one is my favorite, but it just seemed to work for me in a way the next movie would not. Harrison Ford in the role trying to protect his wife and daughter from the revenge minded IRA terrorist had more of an emotional impact and really got you going whereas Present Danger just was missing that and basically banished Ryan's wife (the character Harrison Ford plays) to nothing more than a guest appearance or cameo. This one is about Jack Ryan who I think works for the CIA, he is over in England and spots in the nick of time a couple of IRA guys about to do some bad stuff. Well he basically thwarts them killing one of them and getting himself injured in the process. Well the other guy ends up going for revenge as the other guy killed was his brother. Some good action scenes and drama in this one and it has a really nice concluding scene. As an added bonus Richard Harris is also in it it in a fine supporting role and Sean Bean is great as the IRA terrorist. Of the three Clancy movies this one to me really hooks you in and has the best plot.

Harrison Ford is Jack Ryan, a former CIA agent, coming to London for a conference in British Naval Academy, only to find himself in the middle of a terrorist ambush against a distant cousin of the Royal Family.

Well, what do you know, he successfully disarms the terrorists, killing in the process the 17-year old brother of Sean Miller (Sean Bean), while the others manage to escape. Ryan instantly makes it to the top of Miller's enemy list and we understand it's only a matter of time before we get a hand-to-hand confrontation.

The time is 100 minutes during which Philp Noyce's "Patriot Games" fulfills every premise of an action/thriller: the bad guy's escape, the cowardly attack on Ryan's wife and daughter, a failed (but alarming) one on Ryan, and a cat-and-mouse chase via such exciting tools as political surveillance, mug shots, satellites and glimpses of memory. And after having initially declined the offer, Ryan finally accepts to get back to the CIA (all it took was to measure up how serious the threat against his family was). These are predictable elements meaning to provide the perfect dosage of adrenalin and suspense but what makes them work is the 'intelligence' involved in Ryan's quest for Miller, making him more of a thinker than a typical physical hero. The script insists enough on Ryan's expertise as an analyst.

And there is the whole political back-story, as if the so-called "Patriot Games" were not without rules, one of them being an understandable yet redundant bit of correctness. Basically, Noyce is extremely careful on depicting the villainous group as an independent and more fanatic branch of the Irish Republican Army lead by O'Donnell (Patrick Bergin) who was part of the initial attack. It's comprehensible for a film with international ambitions to play on the safe side not to lose the Irish audience, but we get the point more than needed. One of the IRA leaders is brutally killed in his bed, by O'Donnell's sexy girlfriend (Polly Walker) and the same O'Donnell kills a friend at short range, so the distance between the IRA and the bad guys is clearly and categorically established.

Yet did these precautions matter? For all the political context the script provides, it all leads up to the 'personal' story between Miller and Ryan, Miller who didn't give a damn about fighting for Ireland as soon as his brother hit the ground. Did it also matter when the portrayal of Arabs was more careless? After all, just put your terrorists in any desert camp in 'North Africa' (no need to specify the exact location), throw a name like Gaddafi (Saddam works sometimes) and that's it. I was glad there wasn't any character wearing a red Saudi top hat and shouting some Arab gibberish, to provide the little touch of authenticity. As usual, it's a camp in Libya and like all the camps in Libya, the one that welcomed the bad guys had to be bombed (recent events proved that reality could go that far).

Still, it was a nice touch to show the perplexed face of Harrison Ford, during the camp's bombing, looking from infrared screens, wounded 'terrorist' dragging their way out from fire. His reaction to one of the young upstarts uttering an enthusiastic "Now, that's a kill" while sipping coffee, says it all, the man has gotten soft, which means in our language, more 'human' and we understand how his 'family' lifestyle turned him into a thinker. And this is the sympathetic little twist "Patriot Games" gives us, a different Harrison Ford character, sweeter, gentler, only using force in case of necessary defense. In one of the film's boldest moves, he's prevented from a certain death by a Naval guard. This shows how vulnerable he truly is and how even his determination isn't enough to avoid the worst.

Another effective moment consisted on a shot on his face while he stares at a thick cloud of smoke coming from the freeway, indicating that a car (not any car) had crashed. This is certainly one of the film's most haunting moments as you can read the desperation of a man who realizes that his loved ones are also part of these damn games (although you wonder why they planned to kill him since killing his family and letting him live with that would have been enough a revenge) "Patriot Games" doesn't bring much freshness to the genre but surprisingly offers a hero who's not your typical cynical macho guy, with marital troubles. Ryan has a beautiful and devoted wife. I could have said that Anne Archer seemed to reprise her role from "Fatal Attraction", but the whole film borrows elements from Adrian Lyne's classic, like the car-accident, the big isolated family house, becoming ominous under a stormy night and the mandatory daughter.

Indeed, like for every family in trouble, it's a girl that accentuates the defenselessness when family comedies have young boys who wish their daddies would spend more time with them. But Thora Birch manages to appear like a smart but not precocious girl. The whole 'family' vibes feeling is clearly palpable all through the film, and it's pleasantly surprising how it is used even during the few exchanges with the intimidating James Earl Jones and Jack's buddy, played by a friendlier Samuel L. Jackson. Naturally, there is not much family feeling when the climax starts, especially when you got a fight in a speeding boat on fire about to hit rocks, a move that disappointed many Tom Clancy readers.

Speaking for me, I've never read Clancy, never saw "Hunt for Red October" either (but I'm looking forward to seeing it) so all I had were reverse expectations, I thought I was going to see an action-packed movie starring a super-heroic Harrison Ford, and I was pleasantly surprised by how intelligent and family oriented he was. I guess I'm among the ones who see the half-full glass.

I tried to give this the benefit of the doubt for being from the 90s. But even still, it comes across kind of boring. The acting isn't bad, but Harrison Ford is almost aloof through the whole thing and doesn't give off action hero vibes. While there are some good action scenes, they are way too short. And the ending boat scene? You gotta be kidding me. The whole movie relied on "filler" scenes.

I have wanted to see this film for quite a while now. Ive seen The Hunt For Red October(1990), and Clear and Present Danger(1994), and Patriot Games is much better than them. Patriot Games is a great thinking man's thriller, although its much less difficult to follow than "Clear and Present Danger". It has plenty of suspense and action, and Ford's acting is terrific. I am so surprised that Patriot Games is often considered the worst Clancy film, and "The Hunt For Red October" considered the best, but I think it should be the other way around. Overall a great suspenseful movie. 9 out of 10

Disclaimer: Review may be a bit biased as I have not read the Tom Clancy novel of the same name.

Patriot Games is a short thriller based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name. It follows the events after an IRA assassination plot is foiled by CIA agent Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford). Sean Bean plays IRA renegade Sean Miller seeking revenge. Though all good performances, they are forgotten in this mediocre movie.

There are some beautiful set pieces that take the audience back and forth on different sides of the Atlantic. Yet, I found the plot tying all events together a bit too convenient to be believable.

Action is too far and few between to keep the audience captivated. Some things happen too conveniently. And the plot moves at a snail's pace.

3/5. Though I like espionage films, I couldn't find myself recommending this to anyone except the most devout Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan fans.

First of all, I'm not a Tom Clancy fan, only because for whatever reason I've never gotten around to reading any of his books. I would say it's because so many of them are so huge, but I've always been a voracious reader. I've read almost all of Stephen King's novels, which are also pretty huge, and I'm usually reading three or four at a time. At any rate, I have nothing to offer as far as how closely the movie follows the source material, although I really think this is incredibly important when adapting books to movies.

I have read a lot of criticisms of Patriot Games (and even more of the sequel, Clear and Present Danger), and while I agree with mostly all of it, I still think Patriot Games is a good couple hours of good clean cinematic fun. But maybe that's just because I love Harrison Ford.

Ebert makes the obvious complaint that Jack Ryan, when he finds himself in danger, sends his family to a remote cabin rather than a secure bunker at CIA headquarters, and it's true that this detracts from the movie, but you have to have a movie somehow, and that's a situation where making the smart, real life decision would cancel out the rest of the movie. If everyone in movies made the smart decision all the time, we wouldn't even have a horror genre, for example.

Jack Ryan is described in Clancy's novels as having "undistinguished features," which makes Harrison Ford seem to me like the perfect choice to play him, since I've always thought that, even though he's a brilliant and tremendously loved actor, he can't really act with his face very well. Consider one of my favorite examples of this, the close up shot of his face when he sends that kid into surgery in The Fugitive. You can literally see the effort he's putting into making his face do something moving, and it's just not happening. But the thing it, the shot still works. I don't get it, it's a mystery, as Philip Henslowe might say.

Harrison Ford has played more complex characters (and less complex, of course), and Jack Ryan gets better than this, but Patriot Games is a fun introduction of Ford playing the role, and is especially a must see for Clancy fans.

I don't really like comparing movies directly, since there's an implication that if one did X than the other should also do X in order to be good simply because the first movie did X. However, I do think that comparisons can be helpful in highlighting how one movie fails to engage as well as it could. Patriot Games is the sequel to The Hunt for Red October, and they both purport to be thrillers, but the second movie in the franchise doesn't work nearly as well as the first. It's not bad, but it just doesn't thrill as much as it could, and highlighting the differences in structure between the two could be illuminating.

The Hunt for Red October is a steady build to an exciting conclusion, but Patriot Games meanders around a couple of different plots, with the action and tension pretty much coming to a dead end for a solid half hour, before rushing into a final climax. It's not that Patriot Games is structured differently from Red October, it's just highlighting how Red October works to ratchet up the thrills while Patriot Games moves in fits and starts. Anyway, enough about The Hunt for Red October.

So, Jack Ryan has retired from the CIA and is giving a guest lecture in London at the Royal Naval College when he intervenes in an IRA attack on the royal family, killing a couple of the terrorists, and creating a desire for vengeance in one of the survivors, Sean Miller, whose younger brother Ryan killed. This takes up the first major chunk of the film, and it's quite well handled. You see, the problems with this movie aren't in the individual parts, but in how they're assembled because once Ryan has testified at Sean Miller's trial and gone back to America, the movie, instead of continuing to build tension around what Sean Miller is going to do to get vengeance, stops for a while as Ryan settles back into his life in Maryland, preparing for his classes as a history professor for the next semester. It takes some time for the IRA offshoot to free Sean from captivity.

But even then, once Sean gets broken out of the transport van (in another well handled tense action sequence that works quite well on its own), the movie settles back in to Ryan receiving word of Sean's escape and then going on with his daily life, including receiving a jokey away from his friend Robby in class. The next time we see Sean, he's on a boat headed towards North Africa with the rest of his IRA offshoot buddies as his commander tells him to forget about Jack Ryan and focus on building themselves up as an army. But then, the very next scene we see Sean in, he's in Maryland with several others from the IRA targeting Jack Ryan and his family. We do get a one line explanation afterwards from his commander saying that he let Sean go to America after Ryan, but it still feels like there's something missing between Sean in the ship to North Africa and Sean in a car outside Jack's daughter's school in Maryland.

And, again, the scene of the IRA encircling Jack and his family in two separate locations is really well done, tense, and exciting. I just don't see how it follows from what came before it. When Sean ends up actually showing up at the terrorist training camp in North Africa, having not heard that Jack's family survived his hit, he wants to leave again. And then the movie kind of comes to a stop again. Jack has to research and justify which camp the CIA knows about in North Africa to get a hit on it. Okay, I said I was done talking about The Hunt for Red October, but I guess I lied. This sequence where Jack figures out where to target is reminiscent of the scene with the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Advisor in the White House basement in Red October, but they're handled very differently. In the previous film, Jack figures everything out internally, giving small clues as he works through it, as an argument breaks out around him about how to kill someone, increasing the tension until he breaks it with his explanation. In Patriot Games, he wanders around the CIA offices, getting flashbacks to a couple of points in the film previously, without anything else to help ratchet up the tension. It feels surprisingly lifeless. And then we get the sequence where Jack watches the British SAS from satellite footage attack the camp, after finally justifying it to himself and Admiral Greer. That attack sequence is really good, but it just came after an extended period of surprising lifelessness from the film.

The final big sequence is over the top, especially when Jack takes the boat on the water into a storm to drive the IRA away from his family and the visiting royal from his house, but it's handled well enough to work.

I think part of the problem with the film is that it tries to encompass too much of the book, which I read once about 15 years ago and remember almost nothing of. However, the movie is rife with examples of an unwillingness to cut from the larger story to find the heart of it. I think they should have largely cut the IRA from the film, not completely, and turned Sean Miller into more of a one man vengeance machine against Ryan. The quest to justify the attack on a terrorist training camp as the movie should be ramping up instead of down really kills the momentum. The center of this story is really Sean Miller's search for vengeance, not a weird pseudo-view of the Troubles that doesn't really address any of the issues at hand. That can be more fully and effectively handled in a book of several hundred pages than a two-hour feature film. As a two-hour feature, it can't be about getting all the sequences you loved from the book, but about what makes the story in its shortened version work.

So, the individual pieces are actually quite fun, but it's the connective tissue between them that leaves me scratching my head most of the time.

Harrison Ford kicks some major butt in this film and proves again that he is the leading action star of his generation. Ford's action movie's never really seem silly, they always seem real. Alec Baldwin should have never let the character of Jack Ryan go, because Ford now personifies the super agent. Nice direction from Phillip Noyce and a great score from James Horner make this a very good action film.

Phillip Noyce's 'Patriot Games' is a superb film. Based on the novel of the same name by Tom Clancy, comes out a absorbing thriller that lives up-to it's mark in those 115 minutes. The adventures of Jack Ryan were widely appreciated.

'Patriot Games' is about a Ryan and his family... and of course the baddies. The film has a powerful protagonist, which makes us 'The Viewers' secure and confident. It offers solid entertainment from start to end!

Phillip Noyce's direction is flawless. He has a Superb job! Donald M. McAlpine's Cinematography is eye-catching. In the acting department, Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan is fantastic. Ford, a legend, delivers one of the best performances of his career. Anne Archer has done a good job. Sean Bean as the menace, is menacing and absolutely amazing. Richard Harris, well.. he stands out, as always.

'Patriot Games' is a must watch. Two Thumbs Up!

Patriot Games is a very well done action movie. I didn't feel dumbed down by the plot and everyone took their role seriously. Harrison Ford is the best action star of his generation and this movie is a brillant example of how Hollywood can sometimes make a good action picture. The film is well cast and the direction by Phillip Noyce is top notch. Patriot Games is well worth your while, especially if you like smart action pictures and Harrison Ford.

I found out the other day that the SF raid shown in this film by satellite seems to be based on an actual raid by Delta Force in the early 80's, apparently it was its first successful mission after the bodge up of Op Eagle Claw. Cant remember the book title, but it was all about elite forces etc, and was briefly mentioned in the bit on American SF. Anyone else heard about this? I personally loved this scene, i remember at first i was hoping for something a bit more action film like, but then, that is such a cliché! The cold hearted satisfaction of "that is a...kill!" as a throat os cut, and Fords horror as he realises what he is watching... Makes u think how often stuff like this happens...