Books, Arts & Manners: From Paramilitary to Paraplegic

PROBLEMS SEEM to have beset Patriot Games from the outset. Alec Baldwin dropped out to play Stanley in the Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. (As far as I’m concerned, he could have stayed in Hollywood.) Harrison Ford was brought in as a replacement for nine million dollars as opposed to Baldwin’s modest four. Then Tom Clancy, on whose novel the film is based, spread the angry rumor that the screenplay betrayed the book. Phillip Noyce, the Australian director, had difficulties in presenting the Irish terrorists. Even though they are carefully made members not of the IRA, but of some fanatical splinter group, you must beware, in these politically correct days, of offending anybody. Finally, the underwater duel in the film’s climactic sequence did not register clearly enough, so the fight had to be kept on the deck of the burning speedboat (shades of Cape Fear!) and reshot in two days to meet the release date.

It would be nice to report that, notwithstanding all this, Patriot Games hits the bull’s-eye. It does indeed start out well enough, with an attempted assassination of Britain’s Minister for Northern Ireland, Lord Holmes. As ski-masked terrorists ambush his car, an accidental tourist from America—who happens to be none other than Jack Ryan, the hero of several Clancy novels-foils the assault, kills one terrorist, and helps capture another. Sean Miller, the captive, is the brother of the dead man, and vows vengeance. But Ryan is an ex-Marine, former CIA analyst, and current history prof at Annapolis, establishing him as a triple threat: athlete, technical warrior, and intellectual rolled into one. He testifies bravely at the trial, where Miller and he indulge in one of filmdom’s finest glowering duels.

JS

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John Simon

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PROBLEMS SEEM to have beset Patriot Games from the outset. Alec Baldwin dropped out to play Stanley in the Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. (As far as I’m concerned, he could have stayed in Hollywood.) Harrison Ford was brought in as a replacement for nine million dollars as opposed to Baldwin’s modest four. Then Tom Clancy, on whose novel the film is based, spread the angry rumor that the screenplay betrayed the book. Phillip Noyce, the Australian director, had difficulties in presenting the Irish terrorists. Even though they are carefully made members not of the IRA, but of some fanatical splinter group, you must beware, in these politically correct days, of offending anybody. Finally, the underwater duel in the film’s climactic sequence did not register clearly enough, so the fight had to be kept on the deck of the burning speedboat (shades of Cape Fear!) and reshot in two days to meet the release date.

It would be nice to report that, notwithstanding all this, Patriot Games hits the bull’s-eye. It does indeed start out well enough, with an attempted assassination of Britain’s Minister for Northern Ireland, Lord Holmes. As ski-masked terrorists ambush his car, an accidental tourist from America—who happens to be none other than Jack Ryan, the hero of several Clancy novels-foils the assault, kills one terrorist, and helps capture another. Sean Miller, the captive, is the brother of the dead man, and vows vengeance. But Ryan is an ex-Marine, former CIA analyst, and current history prof at Annapolis, establishing him as a triple threat: athlete, technical warrior, and intellectual rolled into one. He testifies bravely at the trial, where Miller and he indulge in one of filmdom’s finest glowering duels.