Since Jack Ryan last brought his pin-sharp brain, natty suits and oft-frazzled demeanour to the big screen, the landscape has got a lot more crowded for the movie intel operative. James Bond is back in business and Universal ihas revived the Bourne franchise. With all that competition, **Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit **is putting its cards on the table with a lengthy new clip showing that... well, it’s not so very different from those two. This scene's Bourne overtones are obvious, but it seems twinned, emotionally at least, with the crunching bathroom fight at the beginning of Casino Royale.
In four-and-a-bit fraught minutes, the clip packs in double-crosses, hand-to-hand mayhem and Ryan’s first symbolic spilling of blood. There’s also a very swish shower to keep an eye open for and a nasty bit with a bidet that would have had Sean Connery delivering some kind of “bi-DIE!” witticism. Chris Pine’s Ryan plays things a whole lot straighter.
brightcove.createExperiences(); In** Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit**, Ryan’s an established CIA covert analyst who discovers a Russian plot (by Kenneth Branagh’s Viktor Cherevin) to crash the US economy. Naturally, stopping the evil plan won’t require sitting at a computer watching the stock market figures: it’ll mean Ryan getting his hands dirty.
Add to that his handler / mentor, William Harper (Kevin Costner) trying to help him stay alive, and his relationship with wife Cathy (Keira Knightley) and you’ll got the makings of a full-on Ryan cocktail. And here are the four of them adorning these spectacularly generic new character posters that are only a week too late for our Worst Posters Of 2013 list. With David Paymer, Colm Feore and Nonso Anozie rounding out the cast, and Branagh behind the camera, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit makes its way into UK cinemas on January 24.