Movie Review: "Patriot Games" (1992)Paramount Pictures switches leading actors from Alec Baldwin to Harrison Ford as further designated as from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) acclaimed character of Jack Ryan, who must turn to action from in a viciously-executed terror attack on the Prince of Wales and his wife in mid-town London, when this highly-atmospheric suspense thriller based on a book from 1987 written by Tom Clancy (1947-2013) putting a microscopic as political view on a homeland-threatening "war-on-terror" theme outgoing from heart-breaking personal retaliation mission by the fulminate cast nemesis-character of Sean Miller, performed by Sean Bean in fully-engaging action beating manners, accelerating the picture directed by Phillip Noyce into patriotic chase from at that time remaining splinter cells of Irish Republican Army (IRA), who fought the Irish War on Independence from the British ruling United Kingdom (UK) for more then 50 years in the aftermath of World-War-1 (1914-1918)."Patriot Games" remains an Hollywood entertainment movie of the highest order, open for revisits under the restriction that any audience shall be advised to do some research in the now more or less resolved British-Irish conflict since an formally-received announcement in 2005, when suspense takes two peaks in a highway car-raging chase of family murder attempts and night-vision raid on U.S. American soil, where Miller's brother-avenging, ultra-advanced trained and geared death squad stealth-sneaks into never-seen-before conservative home of CIA-analyst Jack Ryan and his loving wife, portrayed by match-making actress Anne Archer, put to defend herself violently, when the message of "Patriot Games" becomes what the United States stand for since their own declaration of independence from the British Empire on July 4th, 1776.© 2018 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

The late Tom Clancy's novels that feature the character of Jack Ryan, senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, have been the basis for a number of solidly crafted but also interesting action films. THE HUNT FOR RED October, released in early 1990, was the first of those films; and it had Alec Baldwin in the role of Ryan. When Baldwin declined to return to the role, however, the producers looked to another great actor, namely the many who had played Indiana Jones and Han Solo but had now become something of a thinking man's action hero: Harrison Ford. That gambit paid off big time, both commercially and artistically, when the second Jack Ryan film came out in 1992, in the form of PATRIOT GAMES.In PATRIOT GAMES, Ford is nearing the end of a vacation in London with his wife (Anne Archer) and daughter (Thora Birch) when he witnesses a violent attack on Lord Holmes (James Fox), a member of the Royal Family and a minister of state for British-ruled Northern Ireland. The attack is carried out by an ultra-violent faction of the notorious Irish Republican Army; and it's an attack that Ford manages to thwart by mere seconds, killing one of the terrorists (Karl Hayden) and wounding his brother (Sean Bean), while their cohorts (Patrick Bergin; Polly Walker) manage to escape. Bean is put on trial and convicted for his part in the attack, but he vows vengeance on Ford. That vengeance is meted out after Bergin and Walker effect Bean's violent escape when, just days after returning to the U.S., Ford is almost killed by one of Bergin's associates at the Naval Academy, and Bean almost kills Archer and Birch on a freeway near Annapolis. Ford now has to rejoin an organization, the CIA, that he had only recently stepped down from in order to do in Bean, Bergin, and Walker, while at the same time hosting Fox at his Maryland home. The whole saga comes to a climax there, where Ford, his family, Fox, and several of their associates come under attack from the IRA radicals during a violent storm.While there are obviously a number of differences between the book and the movie (too many, in fact, for Clancy to stomach, as he disassociated himself from the finished product), PATRIOT GAMES nevertheless works quite well just the same. The success of the film is owed in no small part to the presence of Ford in the role of Ryan. Although his performance in PATRIOT GAMES (and in the later CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) is markedly different from Baldwin's in THE HUNT FOR RED October, the end result is still a high-level action film with psychological thriller elements, and a climactic siege at Ford's house that has elements of CAPE FEAR and STRAW DOGS, along with a harrowing speedboat chase to bring the film to a stunning close. The upping of the violence and sex, and a couple of 'F' bombs in the dialogue, meant, of course, that PATRIOT GAMES had to get an 'R' rating. However, none of these elements are gratuitously used in any way. Alongside Ford and Archer, James Earl Jones returns as CIA director Jim Greer; and the film has good turns from Samuel L. Jackson, and legendary Irish actor Richard Harris as the IRA's principal US "bag man" Paddy O'Neill, who only coughs up the whereabouts of Bergin and Bean after Ford issues a less-than-veiled threat against him in an Irish-American bar in Washington.Australian director Philip Noyce, who had directed the 1989 psychological thriller DEAD CALM, directs PATRIOT GAMES very impressively, keeping the emphasis on the back-and-forth between Ford and Bean, the latter of whom is an incredibly scary radical Irish heavy. The late James Horner, who had already done scores for films such as STAR TREK II, STAR TREK III, BRAINSTORM, AN American TAIL, and AN American TAIL: FIEVEL GOES WEST, provides an equally fine score here as well, utilizing various Irish musical motifs (with an assist from wind soloist Tony Hinnigan).The striking intelligence shown in THE HUNT FOR RED October (and again in CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) is shown here in spades in PATRIOT GAMES, which is why I'm giving it a '9'.

Harrison Ford stars in "Patriot Games" from 1992, an adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel. As the years went on, we were able to see Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, and Chris Pine play Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan, who appears in quite a few books.There was a time when there were films about Irish terrorists, but today, they have been replaced by another group. Former CIA analyst Jack Ryan is visiting England with his wife and daughter when he foils an abduction/murder of members of the Royal Family as they leave the Palace.The masked men were Irish revolutionaries, and Jack kills Paddy, the younger brother of one of the revolutionaries, Sean Miller (Sean Bean). He vows revenge, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. That includes escaping as he's being moved from one prison to the other and traveling to America.This is a very exciting film, with a long and detailed finale that is both scary and fantastic.Harrison Ford is the ultimate movie star, hearkening back to the classic stars of the '30s and '40s. Likable, versatile, and strong, he makes a great Jack Ryan,a man as determined to protect his wife and daughter as his nemesis is to destroy all of them. Anne Archer is lovely as his doctor wife. Sean Bean is hateful, as he should be. Lots of familiar faces -- Patrick Bergin, Thora Birch, James Fox, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Richard Harris, Alum Armstrong ("New Tricks), and Hugh Fraser ("Poirot"). Quite a cast.Truly excellent -- if you never saw it, see it now. Ford plays Ryan again in Clear and Present Danger.

Harrison Ford is Jack Ryan, a former CIA agent, coming to London for a conference in British Naval Academy, only to find himself in the middle of a terrorist ambush against a distant cousin of the Royal Family. Well, what do you know, he successfully disarms the terrorists, killing in the process the 17-year old brother of Sean Miller (Sean Bean), while the others manage to escape. Ryan instantly makes it to the top of Miller's enemy list and we understand it's only a matter of time before we get a hand-to-hand confrontation.The time is 100 minutes during which Philp Noyce's "Patriot Games" fulfills every premise of an action/thriller: the bad guy's escape, the cowardly attack on Ryan's wife and daughter, a failed (but alarming) one on Ryan, and a cat-and-mouse chase via such exciting tools as political surveillance, mug shots, satellites and glimpses of memory. And after having initially declined the offer, Ryan finally accepts to get back to the CIA (all it took was to measure up how serious the threat against his family was). These are predictable elements meaning to provide the perfect dosage of adrenalin and suspense but what makes them work is the 'intelligence' involved in Ryan's quest for Miller, making him more of a thinker than a typical physical hero. The script insists enough on Ryan's expertise as an analyst.And there is the whole political back-story, as if the so-called "Patriot Games" were not without rules, one of them being an understandable yet redundant bit of correctness. Basically, Noyce is extremely careful on depicting the villainous group as an independent and more fanatic branch of the Irish Republican Army lead by O'Donnell (Patrick Bergin) who was part of the initial attack. It's comprehensible for a film with international ambitions to play on the safe side not to lose the Irish audience, but we get the point more than needed. One of the IRA leaders is brutally killed in his bed, by O'Donnell's sexy girlfriend (Polly Walker) and the same O'Donnell kills a friend at short range, so the distance between the IRA and the bad guys is clearly and categorically established. Yet did these precautions matter? For all the political context the script provides, it all leads up to the 'personal' story between Miller and Ryan, Miller who didn't give a damn about fighting for Ireland as soon as his brother hit the ground. Did it also matter when the portrayal of Arabs was more careless? After all, just put your terrorists in any desert camp in 'North Africa' (no need to specify the exact location), throw a name like Gaddafi (Saddam works sometimes) and that's it. I was glad there wasn't any character wearing a red Saudi top hat and shouting some Arab gibberish, to provide the little touch of authenticity. As usual, it's a camp in Libya and like all the camps in Libya, the one that welcomed the bad guys had to be bombed (recent events proved that reality could go that far).Still, it was a nice touch to show the perplexed face of Harrison Ford, during the camp's bombing, looking from infrared screens, wounded 'terrorist' dragging their way out from fire. His reaction to one of the young upstarts uttering an enthusiastic "Now, that's a kill" while sipping coffee, says it all, the man has gotten soft, which means in our language, more 'human' and we understand how his 'family' lifestyle turned him into a thinker. And this is the sympathetic little twist "Patriot Games" gives us, a different Harrison Ford character, sweeter, gentler, only using force in case of necessary defense. In one of the film's boldest moves, he's prevented from a certain death by a Naval guard. This shows how vulnerable he truly is and how even his determination isn't enough to avoid the worst. Another effective moment consisted on a shot on his face while he stares at a thick cloud of smoke coming from the freeway, indicating that a car (not any car) had crashed. This is certainly one of the film's most haunting moments as you can read the desperation of a man who realizes that his loved ones are also part of these damn games (although you wonder why they planned to kill him since killing his family and letting him live with that would have been enough a revenge) "Patriot Games" doesn't bring much freshness to the genre but surprisingly offers a hero who's not your typical cynical macho guy, with marital troubles. Ryan has a beautiful and devoted wife. I could have said that Anne Archer seemed to reprise her role from "Fatal Attraction", but the whole film borrows elements from Adrian Lyne's classic, like the car-accident, the big isolated family house, becoming ominous under a stormy night and the mandatory daughter.Indeed, like for every family in trouble, it's a girl that accentuates the defenselessness when family comedies have young boys who wish their daddies would spend more time with them. But Thora Birch manages to appear like a smart but not precocious girl. The whole 'family' vibes feeling is clearly palpable all through the film, and it's pleasantly surprising how it is used even during the few exchanges with the intimidating James Earl Jones and Jack's buddy, played by a friendlier Samuel L. Jackson. Naturally, there is not much family feeling when the climax starts, especially when you got a fight in a speeding boat on fire about to hit rocks, a move that disappointed many Tom Clancy readers.Speaking for me, I've never read Clancy, never saw "Hunt for Red October" either (but I'm looking forward to seeing it) so all I had were reverse expectations, I thought I was going to see an action-packed movie starring a super-heroic Harrison Ford, and I was pleasantly surprised by how intelligent and family oriented he was. I guess I'm among the ones who see the half-full glass.