This is me digging into some cinematic comfort food on a cold night, when my wife and baby are away at her parents. Un-challenging, but satisfying. I totally dug this fucker.
As I tucked into a beer and my pulled pork sandwich, I looked to Patriot Games simply to fill the silence of the apartment, to give my eyes something to do while my brain took a rest, and it obliged me nicely. Nothing happened in the first 30 minutes to rouse me from my Al Bundy pose on the couch. Well, I thought maybe for a second that Jack Ryan's seaside home looked an awful lot like Richard Dreyfuss' house in What About Bob? and that got me a little excited for a second, but other than that, I was practically a zombie in front of the screen.
Then, before I knew it, I had a lump in my throat during the emotional moment when Harrison Ford is faced with the news of his daughters injuries at the hands of vengeful terrorist, Sean Bean. Maybe it's having a child now, but shit damn, I was really getting tied in knots over this whole thing. Ford's eyes are watering and a look of pain and horror comes over his face when he sees his injured wife and daughter, I was practically welling up. It made me realize what I think most people take for granted: Harrison Ford is not just a movie star, but a very capable actor.
There are thing's Ford can do and things he certainly can't, but the character of Jack Ryan, a brainy analyst with a fierce sense of honor and decent right hook, well that he can definitely do. When he barks in Richard Harris' face, "I will fucking destroy you!" I got chills. I'm used to Ford in interviews and in talk shows, barely speaking above a mumble. Here he was showing the fury of a family man faced with losing it all, and it must have drawn cheers from 1992 multiplex audiences. Maybe I'll have to watch Firewall after all.
There were certainly some weirdly uneven moments and silly movie logic at work, but I acknowledged them while burping pig and beer and moved on. Stuff like Ford being told it was foolish to accost Harris in an IRA bar surrounded by enemies who want him dead. Wait a second, Maryland has IRA bars? In another scene, Sean Bean is firing an uzi at Anne Archer's Porsche as they race along the freeway, hitting everything but his intended target and looking like a Police Academy cadet while doing it. Two scenes later he's in North Africa using the same uzi to blast precision shots in the head of a shooting dummy.
Basically, despite a lumpy throat in one scene, I knew exactly what I was watching: a movie as comfort food with all the fixin's, a movie star, 'splosions and black and white notions of right and wrong. Patriot Games was giving me no reason to get riled up or excited. That is until the midway point when Ford is staring at some grainy satellite footage of that same North African camp, prodding a techie to keep clearing up the resolution to better see a blurry figure. He has been hunting a woman (Polly Walker), his best lead in finding the Irish terrorists who have been gunning for his family. As the image on the screen becomes more clear, the blurry figure comes into focus and we see that this figure has cleavage. The camera zooms in on Ford's face as the realization hits him and for once, a character on screen says exactly what is on the viewers mind, or what was on my mind at least: Tits!
I almost fell off the couch laughing. It was the combination of a fictional character reading my mind and the fact that "tits" was passing over the lips of iconic American Sweetheart Harrison Ford. It was too much for me. Add to that a pretty badass final siege scene at Ford's seaside home, followed by a pretty wicked looking boat chase in the rain and Patriot Games ended up hitting the spot for me.
Tits!
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