Without Remorse   

Review: written June 2021

Action Packed but somehow lacking in thrills

A team with good pedigree has been put together to deliver this Tom Clancy inspired movie. His novel Without Remorse tells the story of John Clark, one of the recurring characters of the previous Jack Ryan novels. He’s essentially the grunt to Ryan’s brains. Alas, the complexity of Ryan’s novel is thrown away in favour of a concoction of hit and miss action pieces. The pot boils down to a fairly simple revenge movie with political skullduggery thrown in, as John Kelly navigates his way to Murmansk, surviving plane crashes, suicide bombers, snipers and assassination attempts along the way. Yes, there are some thrilling moments here and if you’d like a brainless action movie to pass your evening this will do just fine, but it’s sad to see this further dilution of a once great franchise. It’s a movie about the action, and not much else beneath that shallow surface.

That’s not to say that Michael Jordan isn’t a decent fit for the role and he does his best to bring gravitas to the proceedings, and Guy Pearce is rarely bad value. This isn’t enough though, to stop the film being rather generic. Those action set pieces, while undeniably grand in scope, don’t genuinely thrill the way they should.

There is a clear setup for a sequel, Clancy’s ‘Rainbow Six’. Let’s hope the problems with this movie were related to the built in need to create space for a sequel, and that lessons are learned with the next instalment.