Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit: (2014. dir: Kenneth Branagh) This ought to have been a success. Chris Pine is good, Keira Knightley is good, Branagh is good as the Russian heavy facing his mortality, Costner is good in his mentor role. There are some lovely images: Branagh's Cheverin contemplating the Russian cavalry taking the French eagle at Austerlitz is a beautiful moment. When Pine's Ryan barely escapes a brutal assassination attempt and meets Costner for debriefing at a bus-stop, Costner's sad gentleness is sublime. And, after a convincing flirtation between Knightley and Branagh, the moment when he realizes he's been played, the expression into which his face falls, like a man turning into a stone golem, is one for the ages. Cheverin's moment of death is played out gracefully, too. It's almost as if Branagh wanted to direct the film because his interest lay in the poetry of this one character, this one mass of contradictions, poet and killer. It comes off, though, as if he didn't get to make the film he wanted to, only succeeding in vague, melancholy gestures towards what might have been.
That's not the biggest reason, though, that this is a failed project. It fails because it follows The Formula. As usual, you've got the vapid teal and orange color-scheme. You've got the shaky cam, which is always more annoying for me when the acting is good, when you're fair certain that if the camera were sitting still and showing you what the actors were doing, it might be quite interesting, but you'll never know for sure. There are extreme plot-turns and, more distancingly, such narrow windows of time in which the characters may accomplish their ridiculously impossible tasks that you subconsciously stop caring, since it doesn't have anything to do with the real world. You've got the requisite chase scenes: there he goes on a motorcycle, there he goes in a police van. Bet he'll end up in the river. Sorry. Did I give something away?
the Watcher: (2000. dir: Joe Charbinic) Another of those cerebral duels between a serial killer and his hunter. (If they happened half as often in life as they do on our screens, the world would be impossible to live in.) James Spader digs deep and finds gold as the disintegrating cop who has abandoned the dance to dissolve in the acid of his own guilt and remorse; Keanu Reeves is ridiculously miscast as the whimsical maniac. A scene to which the director returns, as if he wants it to be a centerpiece, is one in which Reeves does a sort of dark victory dance at the site of his final hurrah, and it is fatally marred because (one assumes) Reeves can't dance, and therefore the camera and the editor must skirt around its edges, draining away any emotional punch it might have carried.
Charbinic would have ruined it, anyway. He is one of those musical-montage directors; I suspect what he really wanted was to direct music videos, as that's the cheap aesthetic he brings to the piece. When we are watching through the killer's eyes, all brightness is drained from the colors, and he breathes like Darth Vader. There is also a sort of stop-motion effect Charbinic tosses into the mix, sometimes during chase scenes, probably meant to lend a hypnotic air, but instead resulting in a strobe-like distancing, and the last thing we need is further emotional distance, believe me. We have plenty already.
Spader is the one good thing about this movie. Oh, and Chris Ellis as the sidekick cop, an excellent secondary role, and he takes it to town.
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