Clear and Present Danger

Luckily, this final outing for Harrison Ford's "Jack Ryan" is far more entertaining that his previous "Patriot Games" shenanigans from 1992 - so the Queen Mother's other cousins can relax. This time, he is promoted into the shoes of his terminally ill mentor "Greer" (James Earl Jones) as Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA. Everyone is working on plans to shut down the infamous Cali drug cartel in Colombia, but it soon becomes clear that there are wheels within wheels in the US administration, traitors all over the shop, and "Ryan" looks certain to take the fall when the dominoes start to tumble. This is a solid espionage thriller, with a complex plot peppered with a few extended action scenes and some decent performances from Ford, Willem Dafoe as the betrayed enforcer "Clark" and the combination of Messrs. "Ritter" (Henry Czerny) and "Cutter" (Harris Yulin) make poor old "Jack" realise that he might well be safer on the side of the drug lords! It's a bit too long, and certainly it takes maybe thirty minutes of plot development to get going, but once it does it's a quality adaptation of a more cerebral story of corruption, deceit and ass-covering that still holds up thirty years later.