Clear and Present Danger Review

Although 1992's Patriot Games wasn't as financially successful during its summertime theatrical run, it still earned $178 million around the world, which encouraged its producer, Mace Neufeld, to get Paramount Pictures to "greenlight" his next entry in the Jack Ryan series, Clear and Present Danger.

Although Neufeld could have chosen to make a film based on The Cardinal of the Kremlin, which would have been a sequel of sorts to The Hunt for Red October, the producer decided to skip over that Cold War-era tale about a U.S.-Soviet race to develop a "Star Wars" style anti-missile defensive system and Jack Ryan's plan to extract a U.S. mole from the Kremlin itself.

Instead, Neufeld hired writers Donald Stewart, Steven Zaillian, and John Milius to adapt 1989's Clear and Present Danger, partly because it lacked a dependence on a now-ended Cold War scenario, but mostly because Clancy's novel about a politically-motivated War on Drugs and covert operations in Colombia was the best-selling novel of the 1980s.

"These drug cartels represent a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States."

As in the novel, the interception of an American-flagged yacht by a Coast Guard cutter in the Caribbean results in the arrest of two Colombian sicarios (hit men) who have murdered the American owner (along with his entire family). The resulting FBI-CIA investigation reveals that Peter Hardin, the late yacht owner and personal friend of the U.S. President (Donald Moffat), had extensive ties to the Cali drug cartel. Hardin, as Jack Ryan (Ford) explains, had been skimming millions from his "partners," thus sealing his fate.

Although Ryan is aware that the President is understandably upset that his late friend was a money launderer for the drug lords, he is not aware that the National Security Advisor, Admiral James Cutter (Harris Yulin) and his CIA colleague Bob Ritter (Henry Czerny) have been given off-the-record orders to do "something about the drugs pouring into the country." When the President declares to Cutter that the drug cartels pose a "clear and present danger" to the United States, the somewhat slimy admiral and Ritter unleash several covert operations within the sovereign nation of Colombia.

In the process of briefing the President on the still-unproven link between the Cali Cartel and Peter Hardin, Ryan inadvertently allows himself to be sent to the South American country on a fact-finding mission...one that will keep him out of the Cutter-Ritter conspiracy to "invade" Colombia with U.S. military forces.

The President: So go down there, establish it.
Jack Ryan: Go down where?
The President: Colombia.
Jack Ryan: Who, me?

While Ryan does get orders to go to Bogota and find out about Hardin's financial dealings with the Cali Cartel, he is totally unaware that Cutter and Ritter have launched Operation Reciprocity, a clandestine invasion of Colombia by Spanish-speaking special-ops troops. These forces, supervised by ex-CIA field officer John Clark (Willem Dafoe), wreak havoc as they blow up drug labs and smuggling aircraft. Nevertheless, Cutter and Ritter keep Ryan in the dark, and the upright analyst and now acting Deputy Director (Intelligence) unknowingly tells a Senate subcommittee that there are no troop deployments planned for Colombia.

Further complicating Ryan's life is the sudden discovery that his boss and mentor, Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones), is dying of cancer. Little does he know that his ascent to Greer's job will propel Ryan into the middle of a life and death situation in Colombia -- and a constitutional crisis at home.

Assets: What makes the Jack Ryan books and movies work is not just the slam-bam action sequences or the glimpses at the mysterious workings of the CIA, but the very notion that a CIA employee can be portrayed as an honorable and decent fellow. Tom Clancy clearly desired to show that the agents and analysts who work for the CIA are not the Dark Forces depicted in films such as Three Days of the Condor or Firefox. Nor are they martini-swilling, trigger happy, bed-hopping super-spies like James Bond. And in this movie, Harrison Ford shows Ryan has intelligence, courage, and, above all, integrity.

As in Patriot Games, Ford also shares a few short yet important scenes with his wife and two children. Anne Archer and Thora Birch returned to play Ryan's wife Cathy and daughter Sally, joined by  Alexander Lester as John Patrick Ryan, Jr.,  giving Ryan that most un-Bond-like sense of family and a tie to the audience.

Liabilities: Although I am familiar with the notion that no novel, particularly one as complex as Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, can be spared from Screenwriter's Compromises, the trio who adapted it unfairly transformed CIA Director Arthur Moore (Dean Jones) and Deputy Director (Operations) Ritter from well-intentiomed Agency executives to oily villains on the same ethical level as Admiral Cutter, who was a heavy in the book.  I'm willing to overlook most of the changes made by Messrs. Milius, Stewart, and Zallian, including the deletion of Dr. Elizabeth Elliott and the Presidential election campaign that are part of the novel's relevant plotlines, but this vilification of most of the CIA's top levels runs counter to Clancy's vision.

Maybe it's because thematically the movie seems to want to comment on the then-recent spate of government scandals, especially the infamous Iran-Contra scandal, which is "channeled" in the various scenes where Ryan has to go before Congressional committees to provide testimony.

Another disappointment, albeit a more forgivable one, was the film's climax.  Not only was it simplified considerably, but the fate of the major Cartel-related heavies, while cinematically satisfying, is also the obvious Hollywood-style "just deserts" bit.  The novel deals with the bad guys a bit more subtly but perhaps more fittng manner; here, it's the usual good guy-bad guy shoot-'em-up deal. It works, to some degree, but if you read the novel, you'll see what I mean when I say the film's finale is essentially a cop-out.

My Viewpoint:  If it weren't for Ford's presence in the film, Noyce's directing, the humor in the Ryan family scenes, and some pretty nice action sequences, I'd give Clear and Present Danger only three stars,  Clancy isn't the best of prose-writers, but his pre-The Teeth of the Tiger novels were, for the most part, well-plotted and had a great deal of substance and even information about how our system of government works (and sometimes, how it doesn't). 

The movies, on the other hand, seem to focus a bit much on the action-adventure aspects and simplify way too many of the stories.  This is, perhaps, part of the nature of the Hollywood beast, and if viewed strictly as films without literary ties, they still work.