Giochi di potere

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.