Film review: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Unlike The Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, Clear And Present Danger or The Sum Of All Fears, Kenneth Branagh’s film is not adapted from a specific book in the series.

Instead, scriptwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp transplant the eponymous CIA operative into a modern-day terrorist scenario to lay the foundations for a new big screen franchise.

It’s solid, bombastic entertainment, punctuated by outrageous, briskly edited action sequences that owe a sizeable debt to The Bourne Identity and its influential sequels.

Cozad and Koepp meld present and past, harking back to the Cold War to generate friction between global superpowers America and Russia, then playing out a deadly game of cat and mouse using state-of-the-art technology.

The central plot, to de-stablise one country’s austerity-battered economy using the financial markets, seems frighteningly plausible.

But Branagh downplays his villain when some Alan Rickman-style wild overacting might have injected some welcome levity into the deadly serious proceedings, while big set pieces are orchestrated at a lick.