Patriot Games

Patriot Games (1992) opens with a former CIA analyst stopping an assassination attempt in London. Jack Ryan happens to be there, kills one of the attackers, and the dead man's brother comes after him and his family. It is less a spy story than a personal pursuit. The casting change is the best known thing about it. Alec Baldwin had played Ryan in The Hunt for Red October and was in talks to continue. A two month delay forced him to choose between the film and playing A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. By Baldwin's 2011 account, producer David Kirkpatrick demanded an open ended commitment to sequels and he refused. Kirkpatrick denied that, saying negotiations had already collapsed because Baldwin wanted script approval. Director John McTiernan confirmed he had wanted Harrison Ford from the start and that a great deal of scheming went into pushing Baldwin out. Paramount preferred Ford too, owing him money from a cancelled project. Ford signed a nine million dollar three picture deal. Tom Clancy rejected the film before seeing it. He objected to Ford being 49, to technical details written for on screen display, and to the final attack being unrealistic, and asked for his name to be removed. Then he watched a cut and reversed himself, saying he was impressed by how it showed the CIA gathering intelligence. It cost 45 million dollars and grossed 178.1 million worldwide. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: nineties thrillers, procedural espionage, and Harrison Ford. Less good for: the depiction of the IRA is one dimensional and the politics behind it go almost entirely unexplained. The satellite surveillance scene is comic now. The storm at the end works against the realism the film built.