The Quirks of Clancy's Ryanverse on the Screen

Tom Clancy's heyday as a novelist was unquestionably in the 1980s, but the "Ryanverse" he created remains an on-screen presence decades later with Amazon's Jack Ryan series only recently wound up and much more of the Ryanverse supposed to be in the pipeline (not least, a film extending the series). As one might expect in all those decades the franchise has had its share of little oddities from the standpoint of cinematic and pop cultural history.

There is the way that, after making The Hunt for Red October Paramount decided to film Patriot Games with an older actor for what was supposed to be the prequel--a sixteen-years-older than Alec Baldwin Harrison Ford, pushing fifty as he played the "younger" Ryan after edging Baldwin out of a lead once again. (The prior time was in Working Girl, just a couple of years earlier.) There was the irony of star of the avant-garde, countercultural, post-punk Manhattan nightclub scene, face from edgy films like The Hunger and quirky ones like Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right, and tantalizing narrator of HBO's sex-soaked Shock Video: Turn-On TV documentaries (how un-Clancy can you get?) Ann Magnuson playing that stereotype of espionage history and fiction, the lonely secretary susceptible to exploitation by a foreign "Romeo" in Clear and Present Danger (which, of course, is as un-Ann Magnuson as it gets). There was the odd notion of pairing William Shatner with Harrison Ford in the unrealized The Cardinal of the Kremlin. (Captain Kirk meets Han Solo! Great for publicity, great for jokes and laughs--but probably not what those who wanted the film taken seriously were hoping for.) There was how Harrison Ford's Air Force One could be mistaken for a Jack Ryan movie because Ford was playing the President that Ryan had just become in a big techno-thriller film. There was the decision to turn The Sum of All Fears into a rebooting prequel with Ryan as a "rookie," in spite of Ryan's seniority having been central to the resolution of the plot's central crisis--and one might add, the fact that Ben Affleck was so well-received in the role. (These were the now all but forgotten days before Gigli, and the horrible blow that far from brilliant but probably-not-really-worse-than-a-multitude-of-crappy-post-Tarantino-indie-crime-movies film dealt to many of the reputations involved, from which some bounced back--because, really, who could hate Jennifer Lopez on screen?--though alas poor Affleck never completely escaped the backlash even two decades on.)

There was the decision to reboot the franchise yet again in 2015, way, way after the brand wasn't what it used to be, without even a book on which to base the story--this entirely original tale simply using Ryan's name in the B-movieish title, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, while the producers' apparently thinking that making Ryan a rookie again would make it look less "dad thriller," cast Chris Pine as Ryan (instead of Captain Kirk meets Han Solo as Jack Ryan, it was Captain Kirk playing Jack Ryan!) with Sir Kenneth "Shakespeare for the Masses" Branagh not just playing the Russian villain but helming too--and the whole thing ultimately demoted from the would-be summer blockbuster launch the past three Ryanverse films got to a January dump month release. There was the long sequence of unlikely "Mr. Clarks," from Willem Dafoe to Liev Schreiber to Michael B. Jordan (the last in a Without Remorse perhaps unavoidably changed out of all recognition given that even in the '90s the original had been a piece of nostalgia). And of course, after all that, there was the idea of making Jim from The Office the Jack of the series that has been the most recent incarnation of the franchise. (Cue the jokes about Dwight being green with envy, a portrait of life at CIA headquarters where the cast talk to the camera in between office hijinks, and the Jim Halpert stare.)

One would expect it all to have been somewhat more remarked, but again, the brand (in spite of Amazon's recent success with it) just doesn't get the attention it used to, all as I'm not sure how many of those who comment from any sort of significant platform actually looked at Clancy's books--not just recently, but ever, such that I wonder just how many people looking at Patriot Games realize that it was a prequel. (Thrillers of this type tend to see their readerships erode fast and far when their profile drops, all as people are just plain reading less in general, and especially doing less light reading for entertainment.) Indeed, these days it is mainly old folks paying attention (it seems the streaming audience for Jim Halpert's turn as Jack Ryan is skewing strongly gray), the young, I imagine, knowing Clancy as a brand name in video games more than books, movies or TV. Still, the situation also reflects the way things get knocked around in adaptation, the vagaries of artists' careers (don't we want performers to be able to stretch themselves and surprise us?), and how strange such entertainment can look long after their day has passed (Jack Ryan, like so many other such figures, a creature of the Cold War, and only reminding us of that as he dealt with the aftermath of the conflict in a novel like The Bear and the Dragon).