Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit **½ (PG-13) Chris Pine stars in the fourth action feature based on Tom Clancy’s novels about the eponymous CIA analyst/operative, following Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin and Ben Affleck. The Ryan character is thus becoming our domestic James Bond in cinematic presence, though bearing little resemblance to 007 in other respects. This time, we meet a version of Ryan as a grad student in London on 9/11. He immediately signs up for the Marine Corps, is seriously injured in Afghanistan, and eventually recruited to covert CIA duty under the cover of working in high finance when the plot resumes a decade later. Even his physical therapist, who has since become his fiancee (Keira Knightley) doesn’t know his real job.
When his handler (Kevin Costner) sends him to Moscow to follow the money trail on an imminent threat to our economy, the fireworks begin. Kenneth Branagh serves double duty as director and criminal mastermind of semi-Bondian proportions. The rest is formulaic, but executed with reasonably fine style. One would be well served by seeking an IMAX or other large screen to enjoy the scale of the for the big-scale sequences of the film’s latter half.
Pine must be aspiring to a unique title like King of the Prequel, after playing younger, alternate-reality version of William Shatner’s iconic Captain James T. Kirk in the last two Star Trek features. This similarly gives us a spin on Ryan’s beginnings, even though the character’s on-screen heroics appeared in the early 1990s against the "Russkies" and a radical splinter group of the IRA, predating this CIA recruitment. This puts him one hero up on Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller, who’ve brought Sherlock Holmes to the present. But Cumberbatch is at least in second, since he’s the new Spock to Pine’s Kirk in those films. As per Sherlock’s famous quote from Shakespeare, "The game’s afoot!!!" (1/17/14)