1. The story the book tells dated very quickly and very severely. Apart from The Hunt for Red October The Cardinal of the Kremlin was Clancy's most Cold War-steeped story, and in many ways less adjustable than any of his other as yet unfilmed Ryanverse books. Where Patriot Games presented a distinctly Cold War vision of international terrorism in the early '90s the Irish Republican Army was still topical enough for a movie like this (indeed, a few years on Harrison Ford would get caught up with the IRA again in 1997's The Devil's Own). The same also went for Colombian drug cartels when Clear and Present Danger hit the screen in 1994. By contrast, Cardinal focused on the then-popular topic of the American-Soviet race to develop strategic defenses, while also prominently featuring the war in Afghanistan (in which it demonized the Soviets and lionized the tribal-fundamentalist rebels fighting them), and also had plenty of good old-fashioned Cold War-vintage "tradecraft" of the dead drops-and-tails variety. There was just no pretending that all of this was happening in the '90s. Meanwhile some of what was passed off as plausible in the near future in the '80s was looking ever-more silly--not least the claims made for the imminence of dramatic breakthroughs in strategic defense and its associated technologies. (In Clancy's book--just as you saw dramatized in, for instance, the 1985 comedy Spies Like Us--the expectation was of colossal ground-based laser cannons bouncing their laser beams off of constellations of giant orbiting mirrors to almost instantly zap missiles launching on the other side of the planet.) The result was that a Cardinal of the Kremlin movie’s simply presenting a title card that tells us this all secretly happened a few years earlier would seem a lot less passable. And if you cut all this out there is just not much left.
2. The story of Cardinal is exceptionally diffuse--even by Tom Clancy's standards. While even the early "Jack Ryan" novels were generally sprawling, big-picture narratives where Ryan himself was often not present for most of the book (even in The Hunt for Red October the scenes he is actually in comprise just a third of the book) Clancy typically drew the multiple threads of his narratives together in time, space and action to give us a recognizable climax, and put Ryan where the action was, so that he could do something action-heroic enough to justify his “hero-protagonist” status. Thus, even as the Cold War crisis swirled across the North Atlantic, complete with bits like F-14s engaging Soviet fighters from the Kiev and A-10s buzzing a Kirov-class cruiser. (That this scene, only loosely connected with Ryan's action, strictly speaking inessential, and all about the equipment, was reportedly Clancy’s favorite, says a lot about the big picture, technical detail-oriented character of his writing.) Indeed, Ryan himself disappeared from view for long stretches (in the paperback edition you miss him for a hundred pages). Still, Ryan is the one who has the all-important realization that Marko Ramius was indeed defecting, and then contrives to get out to his submarine to personally conduct him westwards, aboard which he even shoots it out with a KGB agent aboard the vessel to “save the day.” In Patriot Games there was the showdown with the vengeful terrorists at his home. And in Clear and Present Danger he not only saw the special forces team that the conniving D.C. bureaucrats abandoned in Colombia extracted, but when the rescue helicopter went in Ryan flew in aboard it, manning a minigun with which he helped fight off attacking drug cartel soldiers. Alas, this does not happen in Cardinal of the Kremlin, where instead the "climax" is more like a "climactic patch" of acts widely separated geographically and in specific intent (a Hostage Rescue team action to rescue a scientist kidnapped by the KGB, a submarine-based infiltration of Cardinal to extricate a defector's family, a raid by Afghan rebels across the Soviet border to wreak havoc on a missile defense research site, etc.). Putting it another way, rather than the threads coming together, Clancy wrapped up the threads separately, their only connection even at the close the broader superpower competition that is the book's concern. And as if that were not enough Ryan is not even physically near the more action movie-type stuff, with his bit in his own part of things fairly un-action hero-like in comparison with the gunplay and other feats of the other books. As a fairly forgiving reader of this kind of narrative I thought it passable, but the hard fact of the matter is that this simply will not work as the big finish of a major feature film, and transforming the narrative into something that will satisfy would, again, change the material out of all recognition.
3. Where, again, the diffuseness of the story of Cardinal makes it hard to say just how much or how little it would have mattered, the story included an element that in the '90s was already looking troublesome, namely a traitor within the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative who was a lesbian, and indeed initiated such a relationship with another character whom she betrayed in the process. That was already enough to cause a backlash (as that other '90s hit, Basic Instinct, showed.)--while the fires of "culture war" were burning ever-hotter, and Clancy, if not so freely expressing his opinions as he would in later books, was still a well-known political conservative in the social as well as other spheres. Some people would be very mad indeed if that element of the plot was left in, while other people would also get mad if it was cut out--and accuse the producers of "caving in" to "political correctness." (Indeed, it would be interesting to know if this particular aspect of the story came up in that failed adaptation process of which we know so little--and what Clancy had to say about it.)
Moreover, great as all of these difficulties already were in the ‘90s they only became greater in the years after, with the Cold War increasingly remote (it was not long before young people didn’t even know what it was); with perceptions of Afghanistan and its recent history changing radically in the U.S. in ways very awkward for proponents of the Cold Warrior/neoconservative perspective in particular; with the blockbuster taking on ever more stereotyped and bombastic form into which any unconventionality of structure required for a recognizable adaptation of Clancy’s tale was ever less likely to fit; and politics just went on becoming ever more sensitized to and obsessed with popular culture, such that it could quickly have got to be "too hot to handle." Still, I do wonder about one detail of the film that was reported at the time--namely that the movie would have seen Harrison Ford teamed up with William Shatner. I very much doubt that even in that decade in which pop culture so often choked on its own irony the backers of the movie had any intention of making a Jack Ryan tale as an action-comedy (I just can’t see Clancy agreeing to this)--but the idea of a movie about "Star Wars" starring Han Solo and Captain Kirk together could still have been something memorable that way.*
Or at least, given us the makings of a really great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.
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