Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/06089936.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 4KB | 84 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 89

CINEMA

The Menace Is Missing


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

    TITLE: Patriot Games
    DIRECTOR: Phillip Noyce
    WRITERS: Donald Stewart, W. Peter Iliff and Steven Zaillian

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A star turn and smart action sequences
enliven an otherwise abstract film.


    Harrison Ford is like one of those sports cars that
advertise acceleration from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in three or four
seconds. He can go from slightly broody inaction to ferocious
reaction in approximately the same time span. And he handles the
tight turns and corkscrew twists of a suspense story without
losing his balance or leaving skid marks on the film. But maybe
the best and most interesting thing about him is that he doesn't
look particularly sleek, quick or powerful; until something or
somebody causes him to gun his engine, he projects the seemly
aura of the family sedan.

    He's the best, although perhaps not the only, reason to
see Patriot Games, which is a sort of sequel to the successful
adaptation of another Tom Clancy thriller, The Hunt for Red
October. Ford replaced Alec Baldwin, who played sometime cia
intelligence analyst Jack Ryan in the earlier movie, when
Baldwin turned uppity. Some other characters are also carried
over from the previous venture.

    In Red October, based on a book written in late cold war
days, Ryan was obliged to prevent nothing less than the
accidental outbreak of nuclear holocaust. In Patriot Games his
problem is less portentous, more personal: he faces a small
rogue faction of the Irish Republican Army -- a bad lot, to be
sure, but not exactly a threat to Civilization As We Know It.

    They only menace civilization as Ryan knows it, in
particular his wife (Anne Archer) and his daughter (Thora
Birch). Peaceably strolling along a London street, Ryan happens
on a terrorist attack on a cousin of the royal family's. In the
course of foiling it, he kills one of the attackers, thereby
bringing on himself and his family the relentless, psychopathic
enmity of the attacker's brother Sean Miller (Sean Bean, a good,
constantly smoldering source of side-stream paranoia).

    Miller, with a lot of help from his friends, is a
far-darting hit man. One minute he's in Maryland staging a
near-miss assault on Ryan's family, the next he's in a Libyan
terrorist-training camp. Back and forth across the Atlantic he
wings, building up his frequent-flyer miles but somehow not
building quite the anxiety you'd think his presence in the world
ought to generate.

    The movie's global reach is a large part of the problem.
Things would be a lot more exciting if the implacable crazy were
constantly hanging around the neighborhood, turning every
shadow, shrub and fast-food joint into a potential menace (see
Robert De Niro in Cape Fear). And the film's fascination with
the CIA's high-tech capabilities for worldwide surveillance of
miscellaneous creeps is not as stirring as its makers seem to
think. It leads to lots of shots of people intently staring into
computer screens or exchanging testy dialogue in small rooms.

    Overall, there is something abstract and distant about
Patriot Games. But there are at least four exciting preliminary
confrontations between the good folks and the bad ones, and a
stormy-night conclusion in which all of the above are somewhat
laboriously maneuvered into a large, dark house, a device that
may be conventional but is nonetheless well managed. Along with
the expert binding of Ford's performance, these are the juicy
raisins -- Shall we say the raisons d'etre? -- in an otherwise
blandish pudding.