Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit takes Ryan’s back history from the books and alters it to speed up his journey to the CIA, updating him into an economics student studying in London who immediately heads home to enlist after the September 11th attacks. Once in Afghanistan, he is badly injured in a helicopter crash and sent Stateside again, where his heroic actions and some unfinished school homework (or something like that) catch the eye of the film’s obligatory Wise Mentor (Kevin Costner). By the way, I’m not really ruining anything for you because this information is spelled out pretty much in the first half hour of the picture, which goes a long way toward draining it of any suspense it may have had. We also meet the bad guy, a powerful Russian businessman named Viktor Cherevin, played in thankfully understated fashion by Kenneth Branagh (who also directed). We say thankfully because we know Branagh’s work and he could have made this guy into Blofeld on steroids if he chose, but luckily decides to ease back on the throttle. The rest of the movie follows all the standard spy paces, as Ryan heads to Moscow, survives one assassination attempt (the motivation for which is also rather murky) and finds himself on the fast track to a confrontation with Cherevin. Events are complicated by Ryan’s girlfriend and eventual wife Cathy (Keira Knightley), reimagined here as a thankless character who’s just in the movie so she can nag her boyfriend, contrive to get herself to Moscow and put herself in the path of danger, as if our poor young hero didn’t have enough on his plate. Branagh, along with screenwriters David Koepp and Adam Cozad, never makes us feel how dangerous the stakes are – even that high speed chase ends up being pretty pointless and doesn’t do anything to move the plot forward. That seems to be the case with most of the action sequences, and it doesn’t help that Branagh directs them all like Paul Greengrass on a bad day, with choppy cuts, extreme close-ups and incoherent geography. There is absolutely nothing here we have not seen before, done better and with a lot more gravity. And that’s the biggest problem with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit: the terrorist plot, the economic machinations, the big business villain, the geopolitical intrigue and the hero/mentor dynamic all feel lifted out of previous films, including a couple of the earlier Ryan adventures. Aside from some details of Ryan’s early history, the film departs completely from Clancy’s novels, which get pretty wild and end up with Ryan becoming president and going to war with China. This is the second time that Paramount Pictures has tried rebooting Ryan after 2002’s The Sum of All Fears, but it’s clear that this latest attempt has made the character into literally a shadow of himself.
title: “Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-03” author: “Richard Bransford”
We follow Pine’s Jack Ryan on his path from an economics student in London, via his tour of duty in Afghanistan as a Marine, and his subsequent injury at the hands of an insurgent attack on his airborne helicopter. It’s while he’s undergoing physiotherapy for a resulting spinal injury that he meets the two people who’ll affect the next few years of his life: Keira Knightley’s Doctor Cathy Muller, who becomes his fiancée, and Kevin Costner’s Commander Thomas Harper. What follows is a kind of action accountancy thriller, with Ryan stumbling across a Russian plot to carry out a form of economic terrorism on US soil; a company called the Cherevin Group has been hiding vital accounts, which Ryan quickly concludes is part of a coordinated attempt to bring the value of the dollar tumbling through the floor. At the behest of the CIA, Ryan is duly dispatched to the company’s Moscow HQ, where the big bad boss Cherevin (played by a glowering Kenneth Branagh, who also directs) awaits with several heavily-armed goons in tow. For at least the first hour, Shadow Recruit moves briskly through its espionage plot, introducing Pine as a capable yet human lead who’s not yet at ease with his shift from desk job to active undercover duty. Ryan’s first encounter with a dangerous assassin is viscerally handled, and if anything, the quiet aftermath is even better; Pine’s portrayal of his character’s shock and fear is perfectly modulated, and it’s refreshing to see an action hero reflect on his actions rather than simply spit out a glib one-liner and move on. Knightley, meanwhile, seems less at ease in a somewhat thankless suspicious love interest role; so convinced is she that Ryan’s seeing someone else behind her back that she flies to Moscow, breaks into Ryan’s hotel room and begins demanding questions of him. In fairness, Knightley acquits herself well in the scenes that come later, but her character isn’t exactly the most sympathetic in the film up to this point. Branagh, meanwhile, makes for an entertaining if unspectacular villain. Like Knightley, he’s a victim of a script that tends to over explain when it could simply leave the audience to join the dots – an otherwise tense scene involving an energy-saving light bulb is undone to a certain degree by the distracting speech that goes on all around it. The last act is an attempt, perhaps, at skewing the Jack Ryan franchise at a slightly younger audience, with Pine given more of a chance to regularly showcase his prodigious fighting, running and vehicle handling abilities than his predecessors. Shadow Recruit therefore pitches itself somewhere between the analytical intrigue of Tom Clancy’s novels and the gritty mayhem of the Bourne series. As a result, the plot and set-pieces are slightly too formulaic to make Shadow Recruit a truly great thriller, but as an introduction to a new incarnation of Jack Ryan, it’s efficient and entertaining enough to make a new series of Pine-led Ryan films an enticing prospect. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is out on the 24th January in the UK. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
