This seems to be the week for popular streaming shows to spawn feature-length films.
I hope the Mandalorian and Grogu are treated with more respect.
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| When a tightly planned operation goes horribly wrong, CIA Deputy Director Greer (Wendell Pierce, center) must be restrained by MI6 operative Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller) and veteran CIA agent Jack Ryan (John Krasinski). |
(On a trivial note, the unwisely chosen title evokes memories of 2011’s vastly superior Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.)
Director Andrew Bernstein and editor Jason Ballantine’s hyperkinetic pacing amplifies the overall sense of racing to be done with this puppy, a feeling that’s particularly true during the expository, banter-laden initial conversation between “retired” CIA agent Ryan (Krasinski) and CIA Deputy Director James Greer (Wendell Pierce).
Honestly, it feels like their chat is being timed by a stopwatch.
Three years have passed since the events in Ryan’s fourth-season streaming show, which concluded when he left the CIA for a vaguely defined “civilian job in hedge funds.” His relationship with Dr. Cathy Mueller (Abbie Cornish) is ancient history, and he greets each day jogging along the streets of New York City.
Meanwhile, in Dubai, two MI6 agents scramble to crack a computer bank in the upper floor of an unfinished DAMAC tower building. Their goal, under the remote guidance of Nigel Cooke (Douglas Hedge), is to extract evidence of off-books black-ops activity thought to have been shuttered 20 years earlier.
Alas, ruthless thugs sent by Liam Crown (Max Beesley) kill them before the information is fully downloaded.
(And what, pray tell, is such a sophisticated, unguarded computer bank doing in an otherwise dusty and littered construction site? Well might you ask...)
Back in the States, Greer begs a favor of Ryan: Go to Dubai, liaise with Cooke, and collect some intel he’s apparently desperate to share. Ryan reluctantly agrees, and travels with a longtime friend: former CIA colleague-turned-private contractor Mike November (Michael Kelly), quick with a quip, and capable in a pinch.
Alas, this “simple” assignment goes south. Cooke is killed, Ryan winds up with nothing but a cigarette pack — and a warning that Greer is “in trouble” — after which he and November are taken into custody by MI6 agent Emma Marlow (Sienna Miller). She’s furious over the way these two Americans have interfered with her surveillance of the situation.
Greer flies to London, to join a meeting chaired by MI6 Deputy Chief Andrew Spear (JJ Field) and Chief Arnold (Dominic Mafham). During a private conversation with Ryan, Greer admits that he and Cooke created “Project Starling” in the wake of 9/11: a brutal black-ops program designed to employ any means necessary, in order to take other terrorists off the board.
But Greer, realizing that the “cure” had become worse than the disease, terminated the program.
This didn’t sit well with Crown, who has resurrected it and intends to orchestrate a major terrorist attack, thereby encouraging the reactivation of other terrorists groups, in order to “prove” that Project Starling is the only means of shutting them down.
If that sounds like bass-ackwards lunacy, it’s hardly the silliest detail in the ludicrously contrived excuse for a script stitched together by Krasinski, Noah Oppenheim and Aaron Rabin. It feels like they made stuff up as filming proceeded, replete with twists, turns and betrayals.
(Maybe it’s just us, but Constant Companion and I immediately knew who the “surprise” traitor would turn out to be.)
This is one of those insufferably dumb stories that finds the villain — Beesley’s Crown, appropriately smug and arrogant — repeatedly arranging face-to-face encounters with Ryan and Greer, just to taunt them ... when, in a legitimate narrative, Crown easily could/should have been blown away half a dozen times.
Bernstein and stunt coordinator Lee Morrison orchestrate a tautly choreographed car chase through the streets of London, and they also deliver a mildly suspenseful climax back in Dubai, in the same DAMAC tower building ... where Crown still has left that computer bank unguarded. (Seriously?)
The scripted nonsense aside, Krasinski still persuasively inhabits his key role. Ryan is older, wearier and grimly resigned to the half-truths and lies he repeatedly encounters. Pierce has a meaty part, as the conflicted and guilt-ridden Greer, who recognizes his responsibility for this mess. Kelly supplies light comic relief, and Miller is a capable femme fatale.
Betty Gabriel returns briefly as seasoned CIA Director Elizabeth Wright, and Hodge’s Cooke is persuasively scared and twitchy. Adam Bernett makes the most of his third-act appearance as Patrick Klinghoffer, a helpful desk-bound CIA computer analyst.
The sad truth is that all the actors — and their characters — are much better than the inane shenanigans foisted upon them by the numbnuts story. Which merely reinforces what I’ve said for decades:
It’s always the script, stupid.
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