Though Russia's post WWII communist enslavement of Eastern Europe subjected millions of people to a life of unremitting hardship, the subsequent 40 year old Russian-US Cold War, with its well-documented acts of espionage, double cross and military brinkmanship, could not have provided spy novelists like John Le Carre, Graeme Greene and Tom Clancy with a more perfect milieu upon which to graft their specialised brand of political intrigue, skullduggery and disillusionment. The fall of the Berlin Wall, however, has forced these thriller writers to insert their heroes (or anti-heroes) into other more contemporary theatres of conflict.
Without missing a beat, Tom Clancy has opted to anoint the evil Columbian drug lord as the next all-purpose international bogeyman. In the third of Clancy's best sellers to get the big screen treatment, CIA super spook Jack Ryan barely has time to organise his travel insurance before he is whisked off to the South American jungle to engage in some high-calibre eye-balling with a powerful drug cartel kingpin who is suspected of having sanctioned the murder of the president's closest friend and his family. Paring down Clancy's 700 page door stopper, writers Donald Stewart, Steve Zaillian and John Milius have constructed a taut genre exercise which director Phillip Noyce (who managed to mangle Patriot Games, his previous Clancy adaptation) skillfully embroiders for maximum thrills and suspense. Harrison Ford (the thinking man's action hero) is once again a picture of self-effacing recititude as Company man Ryan. Co-starring Willem Dafoe and Anne Archer.
