Tom Clancy's Without Remorse: Michael B. Jordan physically carries this meat-and-potatoes action film, stale Cold War vibe and all

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

It speaks to how integral the Cold War was to Tom Clancy’s oeuvre that less than two years after the fall of the Soviet Union, he was already releasing a book about a plot to make the U.S. and Russia enemies again.

The novel that begat the noisy new Amazon Prime movie Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse came out in 1993 (Clancy died in 2013), and is considered a spin-off of the Jack Ryan series, this one starring a revenge-seeking Navy SEAL turned ghost operative named John Clark.

Jodie Turner-Smith and Michael B. Jordan are outgunned and outnumbered during Russian ops

After nearly 30 years of “development hell” for Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, with everyone from Keanu Reeves to Tom Hardy touted for the role, Michael B. Jordan tries his hand at playing a killing machine in an intended franchise. There are already plans to film Rainbow Six, based on the 1998 novel, which also features Clark, and which is probably more famous for its video game incarnations.

But consequently, despite all the gunfire and noisy sieges, Without Remorse seems like a plot from a different time. 

Here, the dynamic for reigniting the Cold War goes like this. A SEAL team in Aleppo, Syria is assigned to retrieve a CIA agent being held hostage. It’s not clear who they are supposed to be saving him from, but it turns out his captors are – surprise! - Russians. And killing them comes with under-the-radar consequences.

Clark (Jordan) is furious at the deception, despite attempts to talk him down by his tough-as-nails superior, Lt. Comm. Karen Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith), and quits the military for a (hopefully) quieter life with his wife (Lauren London), who is expecting their first child.

Except that, some time later, members of Clark’s team start dying – killed on American soil. And the inevitable attack on his happy home leaves him bereft and fighting for his life in hospital.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

The State Department’s realpolitik approach to the murderous incursion is, “We took out some of theirs, they took out some of ours. We’re even.”

But Clark’s unauthorized operations following his release from hospital ruin the diplomatic math. If the quid pro quo killings continue, the thinking is, it could escalate into war.

The fact is, in 2021, putting boots on the ground on foreign soil and leaving casualties to take down an enemy nation has already been rendered quaint by the Russians. 

If the U.S. did provoke the Russians to such an extent, they’d probably just double down on what they’re already doing – hacking and destabilizing major government and corporate websites, and flooding social media with political provocateurs pretending to be “patriots,” with the intention of making the U.S. the first superpower to argue itself to death.

Italian director Stefano Sollima is on familiar ground with this gun-fueled tale of high-level betrayal and unclear missions, having directed the lesser Sicario sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado and the entertaining drug cartel mini-series ZeroZeroZero (also on Prime). And he doesn’t let left-brained quibbles (like how does the media report on each suspicious SEAL death without connecting them?) slow him down from his primary goal.

That goal: To set Jordan up as a believable, unkillable, engine of destruction, someone who can be surrounded in a building by Russian military and decimate his attackers before slipping away amid dust and carnage. This is meat-and-potatoes Tom Clancy, with a hard-to-control protagonist, nonetheless being used at arms’ length by his former superiors to stir up a geopolitical pot.

There’s the occasional flash of purple dialogue about loving a country that doesn’t love us back, and “a pawn can take out a king” (Clark is a chess fan on the side). But mostly, this is a look at how solid actors can carry a nuts-and-bolts, dramatically undemanding action film. Jordan is physically imposing, and handles the action choreography with style. And Jamie Bell does what Brit actors do best, put on an American accent and make an apparently cardboard villain (a weaselly CIA higher-up named Robert Ritter) seem real.

All in all, there’s enough gas left in the tank for that sequel, and room to find John Clark’s footing.

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. Directed by Stefano Sollima. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jodie-Turner Smith and Jamie Bell. Debuts on Prime, Friday, April 30.