You've been on pins and needles for somebody to review the books your dad was reading when you were in middle school; we're here to help. Last year, we read all of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books in order of Ryanverse chronology rather than order of publication (we include the John Clark and Jack Ryan Jr. books in this process). This year, we're doing it again and posting about each of the books as we complete them/manage to be sufficiently unlazy to actually post a blog. Your comments are more than welcome. NOTE: POSSIBLE DECADES-OLD SPOILERS!!!
Plot/Subplots
President [name redacted] of the [name redacted] Party is facing reelection and is trailing the Democratic candidate in the polls and needs to show he's getting things done. In order to demonstrate his leadership skills to the voting public, he secretly authorizes his National Security Adviser, Admiral Cutter, and CIA's Deputy Director (Operations), Bob Ritter, to use the military to covertly destroy drug production in Colombia, without the consent or even the knowledge of the Colombian government.
Domingo "Ding" Chavez has evolved from a kid who survived the crime-ridden barrio to become a badass light infantry soldier for the US Army. He's recruited for a top-secret mission which unravels.
Felix Cortez is a Soviet-trained former Cuban intelligence agent who now works for Ernesto Escobedo, a honcho in the Colombian drug cartel. As he sniffs out the CIA's plan, Cortez envisions an opportunity to take control of the cartel for himself.
Captain Red Wegener of the Coast Guard and his crew discover a
Jack Ryan is now the acting Deputy Director (Intelligence) as James Greer is dying of cancer. Having previously been shut out of the Colombia plan (and therefore was to unknowingly illegally withhold information from Congress), Jack discovers the operation and launches one of his own to rescue the soldiers in danger as the illegal mission falls apart.
Character Flow
Portagee Oreza's Ryanverse introduction here is as a tertiary character hanging out on the Coast Guard boat, though he reappears as a major character in the prequel Without Remorse and again in retirement in Debt of Honor. We meet Ding Chavez, an important character in each of the subsequent books featured heavily in Rainbow Six and the Campus books. Buck Zimmer is introduced and dies, Jack vowing to take care of his large family and see his children through college. Zimmer's family is visited a handful of times and Jack's secret support of them is blown up into a scandal in Executive Orders.
When Jack Ryan and John Clark finally meet, Jack learns that Clark has been involved in three of Ryan's operations: participating on the assaults on Action Directe and the abandoned ULA camp (from Patriot Games), and physically putting Gerasimov on the submarine in The Cardinal of the Kremlin. No mention is made at this time (though it will be in a later book) that Ryan's detective father worked Clark's case in Baltimore.
Evil. Is. Punished.
Through the whole Jack Ryan series, the it's rare that villains go to jail. They are usually reunited with their Maker, often at the hands/missiles of our heroes, but frequently by their fellow villains or suicide. Traitor Peter Henderson survives Without Remorse, but in Cardinal is caught and forced into being a double agent. In this book, the pirates who murdered the family on the yacht dodge the death penalty, but crooked cops arrange for some fellow inmates to eliminate them. Danger is the first book where Clancy gets cute about punishing the main bad guys. Felix Cortez and Ernesto Escobedo are apprehended by our heroes, but since they're unlikely to be properly prosecuted by the applicable justice systems, are delivered to Cuban intelligence and aggrieved cartel chiefs respectively. Cutter dies in a non-accident.
Review
Danger is a compelling military thriller and political thought exercise. The War on Drugs is the setting, not the theme. Drug addicts are considered only through the point of view of their military family members who wish to do harm to the producers of drugs. The morality or effectiveness of the criminalization of drug use isn't contemplated, but clear contempt is expressed for drug dealers. This book is largely an extolment of the rule of law. Jack's problem isn't the idea of the operation or using the military to pursue non-defense aims, it's that he's being forced to lie about it, in violation of the law.
The primary question considered is who is responsible when the Big Choices are made, the person who has the authority to make the call or the personal delegated with the task of doing the actual work? The answer is: all of the above. Tom Clancy makes it clear: you must take responsibility to do what's right, especially when you've made a terrible choice, or you're scum. Ryan stumbles onto the operation starting with information from a third party (the great Robby Jackson), but once he's discovered what has gone wrong, he does everything in his power (and outside it, too) to make it right. Ritter knows Cutter is going to screw over the remaining soldiers in the jungle, has a crisis of conscience but still chooses self-preservation, and then helps after he's been called out. Cutter always looks for the expedient and self-aggrandizing path, so Clancy throws him under the bus - literally. Ryanverse characters largely determine their own destiny, either directly like Admiral Cutter or more in the sense of putting themselves in position for Fate to make good use of them, like Jack.
Danger moves along at consistent pace and the dialogue feels natural and interesting. The characters think and feel through their tasks. Badasses Ding Chavez and Oso Vega experience dread, pride, determination, fear, and camaraderie in their training and mission. Clark feels elation at first when they bomb the cartel, but reminds himself he's not a psychopath (an idea revisited in Without Remorse). Jack, ever the self-chider, is tempting to play the CYA game, swallows his fears of flying and combat, feels guilt and responsibility for the men in the jungle, and struggles to accept the reality of Greer's imminent demise (or taking his place). Felix Cortez always has his eyes open, playing all sides to his advantage, and seizes opportunities as they present themselves. Clear and Present Danger is one of Clancy's best in terms of both character and plot.
Movie
Check out the cast of this movie: Benjamin Bratt, Dean Jones, Thora Birch, James Earl Jones, Rex Linn (aka Frank from CSI Miami), Freddie from House of Cards, and Clark Gregg (aka Agent Coulson of the Avengers/Agents of SHIELD). And those are the bit players! Harrison Ford is a solid Jack Ryan, already experienced at playing an everyman who's also brilliant. Henry Czerny is fun as Ritter, as you'd expect. Anne Archer is boring. Cortez and Escobedo are well played by actors you've seen a million times, but my favorite bit of casting is Ding Chavez, played by Raymond Cruz. You may know him as Tuco from Breaking Bad. This Tuco:
The movie is an entertaining but somewhat lazy 90s thriller. Some of the plot consolidation doesn't end up making sense. Jack is inserted in a lot of action where he wasn't before (they were paying Harrison Ford a zillion dollars): he ends up investigating issues clearly under the jurisdiction of the FBI and showing up in Colombia just to get grenades launched at him. For some reason, President "Bennett" is friends with the crooked guy on the yacht, which mainly serves as a device for Jack to be proud of himself when the president takes his advice on not downplaying the relationship, which we suppose is to be a counterpoint to Jack yelling at the president at the end of the movie.
Ritter is reduced to a shady bad guy and Clark a shady "good" guy with the weirdly cast Willem Defoe. The problem of most movie adaptations is that the characters are largely stripped of personality and reduced to plot functionaries (see Ron and Hermione in the Harry Potter series); it's true for every character in this adaptation. The morality and effectiveness of these political choices are barely considered.
The training scene where Ding blows the mind of the instructing officers is pretty great:
There's also a scene where Escobedo is playing in his batting cage while Cortez is challenging him to reconsider his thinking. A baseball dramatically flies by Escobedo in slow motion. It is some bold symbolism.
What About the Movie/TV Show to be Produced by WYNE Media?
What the Clear and Present Danger TV season could do is restore more of the conflicts that make it interesting. The story most diminished in the transition from book to movie is that of the soldiers fighting in the jungle, from an emotional and action standpoint. They feel an unease as they recognize they're all Spanish-speaking Latinos. It is so devastating when Cutter abandons them and they don't know what's going on; Captain Ramirez is tortured by every decision possibility. Part of the reason these particular soldiers are selected and dressed the way they are is to create an intra-cartel conflict, which is not addressed in the movie. Cutter does everything he can to try to be divorced from any responsibility from his actions from the beginning. The show could spend more time on the question of what the President is personally responsible for when he doesn't know the specifics of operations he authorizes or condones (timely with scandals of the last two administrations involving the IRS, NSA spying, Fast and Furious, etc.) In the book, Moira is a combination of widow hampered by grief and yet still a total catch, so the show could give her a lot more humanity than the movie. The movie doesn't really develop any relationships and doesn't explain why Clark would forgive Ryan after he took the blame for cutting of the soldiers (a dumb deviation), so the show could allow these connections to breathe.
Miscellanea
Dan Murray is a major fixture in the Ryanverse and a prominent FBI person, thus murdering him in the movie was shortsighted. Dan Murray is the name of one of my high school buddies, who got to see a movie where the characters say "Dan Murray is dead."
Mormon update: we meet Senator Sam Fellows, "the tough-minded Mormon from Arizona" who is best friends with gay liberal New Englander Al Trent. Jack Ryan is fascinated with the LDS temple.
The movie also includes a dramatic scene where a baseball is shown slow-motion flying through a batting cage for no reason at all. Alas, we couldn't find a Youtube clip of this important moment.
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