Rob and I were trying to go see The Wolf of Wall Street yesterday, but the timing didn't work out so we went to Best Buy instead. Rob is a big fan of the Tom Clancy movie adaptations and, thanks to him, I have now seen all of them except Patriot Games. Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) is a CIA analyst working the Russian desk. When the old Russian president dies suddenly, and a new guy, Nimrov (Ciaran Hinds) takes over it turns out Ryan is the only person to have ever written a paper on him. Bill Cabot (Morgan Freeman) wants insight to Nimrov, since he appears to be a party hard-liner, especially on the issue of Chechen independence. While inspecting the nuclear facilities in Moscow, Ryan notices that three key scientists are missing. They begin to suspect that the scientists are working on an unattributable nuclear weapon. Ryan doesn't think Nimrov is behind it but he's pretty much the only one. When the bomb is detonated in Baltimore, in a clear attempt to kill the President of the United States (James Cromwell), Ryan has to race to get enough information to prevent World War III.
This doesn't come close to The Hunt for Red October in terms of quality but it's still miles better than Shadow Recruit. It's been a while since I've read the source novel but I'm pretty sure it takes some glaring liberties. Either that or it combined two novels into one.
I wish I could do one of those time lapse things but it's a blog, not video so I can't. It was going to bother me all day so I just checked Wikipedia. In the book, the bad guys were Palestinian terrorists and angry East Germans using a false flag to look like Russians. I can kind of see how, in 2002, you don't want to go with East Germans since they don't fucking exist anymore but it kind of irritated me that the Palestinian angle was left out. To me, that makes more sense. Still, I don't make the movies, I just watch them.
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