Tom Clancy was once a stalwart of the boomer-dad action story, as exemplified by his Jack Ryan novels and their film adaptations, and his brand caught on with a whole new generation at the turn of the millennium with the rise of video games. Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell have become successful franchises under his name, immersing us into the C.I.A. and military operations that are Clancy’s forte. And perhaps the inevitable result of this trajectory is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, which aims to marry the author’s conservative expressions of patriotism with modern-day tech-savvy thrills, a backwards amalgamation that more or less means it’s “game over” for the film right out of the gate.
Based on Clancy’s 1993 novel of the same name, the film tells the origin story of Navy SEAL John Kelly, an important member of the “Ryanverse” who was first portrayed by Willem Dafoe in 1994’s Clear and Present Danger. Without Remorse opens with Kelly (Michael B. Jordan) and his crew on a rescue mission in Syria to extract a captured C.I.A. operative. But the mission ends up being a trap—one involving unexpected Russian targets—and once the SEALs are back on American soil, they’re targeted by shadowy assassins from the Motherland. During a nighttime home invasion, Kelly narrowly avoids being killed, but his pregnant wife, Pam (Lauren London), isn’t so lucky. The woman exists solely as a catalyst for our hero’s rage, ensuring that the mission to find the culprits, as in Patriot Games, is fiercely personal.
As John le Carré always made apparent, however, is that espionage is never personal. By contrast, Clancy is prone to sending his protagonists down the path of vengeance, sidestepping all notions of bureaucratic realism along the way. Without Remorse eventually finds Kelly, who furiously states at one point that “we’re gonna play by my rules now,” heading up a new operation in Murmansk, Russia, alongside close friend Lt. Commander Karen Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith). The goal is to capture the man responsible for Pam’s death, ex-nationalist Victor Rykov (Brett Gelman), who may have an even bigger plan of global chaos in the works (in a brief meeting, he’s ominously described as “a planner and a doer”).
As Without Remorse barrels through one rote sequence after another, Kelly uncovers a larger conspiracy to escalate a state of warfare between the U.S. and Russia in order to preserve the well-being of the American people. It’s potent stuff, especially given the political climate of the last few years, but the film gets its kicks less from the impact of geopolitical tensions than it does from Kelly’s quest for revenge. That’s in part a result of keeping the novel’s stale Cold War-era machinations intact, treating the idea of government leaders being intimately tied to Russia as a shocking last-minute plot development. And the whole thing is shot in the dour style of a latter-day Tom Clancy game, with a procession of darkly lit gunfights served up alongside interpersonal moments that are about as convincing as a video game’s cutscenes.
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