Favorite Jack Ryan Film?

I love The Hunt For Red October. The acting, direction etc etc all superb. McTiernan at his best and Baldwin in peak form.

Clear and Present Danger right behind it. Wonderful job all around and Dafoe is a champ in this.

Patriot Games is fairly solid for the first two thirds but the final act falls apart and gets silly. Sean Bean gives his all and Samuel Jackson with a silencer pleases Pai Mai.

Sum of All Fears was the worst of my fears. Affleck woefully out of his element and outside a few performances (notably Liev Schrieber, Colm Feore) it plays like a CBS tv movie.

"Hunt" by a wide margin. "Sum" is only somewhat watchable, and both Ford pictures are very good "one-timers". "Hunt" is also the only Ryan film that could rightfully be called an ensemble picture. Sam Neill, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Jordan, and Scott Glenn all get their moments in addition to Baldwin and Connery.

I'm partial to the Ford pictures, with Patriot Games slightly outshining Clear And Present Danger. Hunt For Red October is a great little Cold War flick, and The Sum of All Fears, while the weakest of the bunch, is great popcorn entertainment with some truly likeable characters.

Gotta go with Red October.... The reason being is that it wasnt really Jack Ryans show, it was more to do with the mechinations onboard Connery's and Scott Glenn's subs.

A much better cold war thriller than any of the rest.

Air Force One, wait, that's not right.

Clear is the best and tightest of them as far as I'm concerned. I thought it had a great cast and kept everything heading in the right direction all the way to the end.

I liked Hunt, but even though he did a great job I was not buying Connery as a Russian sub commander. His accent was.....lacking. Patriot games was great as well.

Sum of All Fears....man was I disappointed in that one. Doesn't even deserve to be on the same list with the others imo.

Clear and Present Danger. Dont remember the others so much, and I havent seen Sum because it looks crap and Ford isnt in it.

Red October, followed by the first two-thirds of Patriot Games, then Clear & Present.

Baldwin's Connery impression alone elevates October over the Ford movies.

Liev Schreiber performance in Sum was it's only redeeming quality.

Clear is clearly the best...yeah, not funny. All I can say is Willem Dafoe as Clark rocked it all bitches!!!

The Hunt is the only one.

I'm very partial to Patriot Games. That said, Hunt for Red October and Clear & Present Danger are both excellent.

While the Sum of All Fears is enjoyable, it is very flawed. I had always understood that it was SUPPOSED to be a prequel to the other three. I really don't see how it could be though. First off, it dates itself by stating a time period in which takes place. Second, big continuity error. When Ryan (Ford) met Clark (Dafoe) in CAPD, it was for the first time. If the same series, how could Ryan (Affleck) have met Clark (Schrieber) at the start of his career. There's no way it's the same series. That said, I want a Without Remorse film with Schrieber in the role. I don't see them doing another Ryan film any time soon, at least not with Affleck in the role.

I look at The Sum of All Fears as an alternate-reality movie -- not in the same timeline as the other three films.

John Woo is apparently directing a Rainbow Six movie. I'm hoping they adjust the plotline enough to let Liev Schreiber take on the John Clark role again - he was fantastic in TSOAF.

I think Ford was the best Ryan of the lot, but Red October is my favourite 'Ryan' movie. While 'Sum' may be the lowest ranked of the four, I think it is a pretty good movie, and well made. The only real shortfall plotwise was missing out the reasons why the nuclear response was ramped up.

Clancy is weak as a writer, largely because his backstories get in the way of the plot. Every other paragraph goes something like this:

"Jack Ryan walked slowly down the stairs of the Capitol building, upset at how the meeting with the Security Council had gone. In his holster he had his trusty ProShooter .38 caliber, which was developed by the Israeli military in the 1970s. Jack spent fifteen months in Israel as a deep cover spy for the US government under the code name 'FreedomHawk,' but it wasn't really the US government, it was a shadow government, playing Jack and other operative like pawns in a global chess game where both players are blindfolded. Jack met Alice in Israel, but Alice was dead." Ten pages later, Clancy gets back to real time.

That having been said...Hunt, followed by Clear.

(Error-post)

Woah, guess what I just voted Sum suckers!!! Prepare to bomb me now...but seriously, I have a serious hatred towards Patriot Games for some reason. Keep in mind I love the books and what not, but I just found that the way the film develops was just not good. The final boat chase in the movie just seems bad to me...in fact that whole movie in my opinion is a stinker.

The reason for me liking Sum of All Fears...well I'm not sure. I just like it a lot. Granted the whole nazi instead of arab replacement was really bunk if you ask me but the way the story develops, the characters, I found myself liking it a lot more than any other Tom Clancy film. Heck, I stomached Ben Affleck fine!!!

In other news, when does Rainbow 6 become a movie? I know we all want to see environmentalists die and the homeless injected with a horrible virus...right?

I agree with that, but I think it got worse as the series went along. His first five or six books are written very well but his latest stuff, I can't even read Bear and the Dragon.

Hunt for Red October was the best, but I did enjoy the asschewing that Harrison Ford gives the President in Clear and Present Danger....

How DARE you SIR!!!

I like how Harrison Fords facial expression never changes...from I just got hit in the back of the head to he just got told they killed his family to the mission was all a farce...he always has that suprised/angry emotion thing.

Ah yes. One of the dozens of projects he has signed on to do after SpyHunter, along with:

Untitled Chow Yun Fat/Nic Cage Project
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (oh yes, another He-Man movie)
The Red Circle
The War of the Red Cliff
Metroid

There's a couple more, but I can't remember what they are. He's just like Spielberg, he signs onto do another project every month.

After the dreadful Afflecking of The Sum of All Fears, I thought Schreiber as Clark was very proper. Personally, I wish there was someone in Hollywood trying to get Without Remorse turned into a script and have Liev attached to it.

thread

This thread inspired me to see "sum of all fears" which I had not seen until last weekend - I was suprised that it was pretty good.

On its own terms, Sum's a pretty good flick -- generally light-weight, with clear-cut heroes and villains, and a pretty good time overall. It just doesn't compare to the other three.

You're forgetting his most used acting schtick - pointing his finger!

I like Sum, because it's this whole cast of interesting characters interacting. To me, they found what was most interesting about the previous films, and made that more of the focus. I won't deny that Affleck is the least-great actor to take the role, but I think the script is the best, and these are really script-driven kinds of movies.

After that, I'll take Hunt for Red October. The two Ford films get confused in my mind, I think I liked Danger better than Patriot Games, but who can keep that shit straight?

Well, I voted for Clear And Present Danger. I found it to be the most complete film of the series personally.

Funny how you thought it blew but felt that Sum Of All Fears was an improvement. SOAF was by far the worst installment of the series. Affleck sucked badly and the movie itself lacked the tension that the others in the series created.

I personally like Baldwin's Ryan better than Ford's, but Connery's accent (he was a RUSSIAN for god sakes, not a scott) fucked with me way too much for me to bump the movie as a whole over CAPD or even Patriot Games.

I went with Clear and Present Danger. Why? Because that's my favorite out of them. Duh.

I'd go for 'Hunt...' and then 'Sum...' personally. I've never really found Ford convincing in anything (Save for Star Wars/Indy and his fantastic performance in 'Mosquito Coast'). After the 80's came and went he acted the same in every movie. As has already been pointed out here, the finger pointing, the same expression regardless of what happens to him and there's no discernable difference between any of the characters in his movies...well I'm sure there was at the script stage, but why let the script get in the way of your 'performance' eh? But aside from that, both 'Patriot Games' and 'Clear & Present Danger' bore me half to death. I got no idea why though...I just find myself getting distracted while watching them. It's been a while since I've tried watching either of them though so i'll have to give them another go one day.

Baldwin was by far and away the best Ryan, and 'Hunt...' is just well written and well made. You can't ask for much more than that.

As for Affleck, well he convinced me he was up to the job. It just seems to me that people dismiss SOAF because of the way they feel about Bennifer. Sure he's a bit of a prick, and picks awful films ('Paycheck' anyone...actually the first Affleck movie where I've noticed just how bad an actor he can be). On the whole though the film (timelines notwithstanding) is a pretty good one, it's by no means an amazing film, but I can easily watch it whenever it's on.

If Sum lacked tension then what did Clear and Present have? The most tension was Harrison Fords classic confused facial expression after Dafoe smashed him in the head with a gun. I feel that the 2 Ford Clancy movies were really devoid of any tension...except perhaps that hot sexual tension between Ding and Jack.

Gary Oldman being defeated by Harrison Ford is so wrong.