REVIEW: ‘Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse’ is regrettably bland
Michael B. Jordan stars in the latest adaptation of Tom Clancy’s bestselling books.
While I marvel at all the ways the MCU has managed to create one, big coherent universe, one of its unintended consequences was basically forcing all the other studios to follow suit. That’s not Marvel’s fault – it’s just a natural next step in an industry that often tries to emulate each other and rip-off each other’s success.
Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is Amazon’s foray into this universe-building exercise with characters adapted from the Tom Clancy universe (TCU?), with Michael B. Jordan starring in their first entry as John Kelly, a Navy SEAL operative seeking revenge for the murder of his pregnant wife by a mysterious Russian special ops force. This one-sentence plot summary basically tells you how the rest of the story is going to go: John is basically a one-man army, his mission is complicated by a possible mole on his team, there’s a politician who is too keen to support him and therefore can’t be trusted, and there’s all sorts of bureaucratic red tape that John conveniently busts through without any real consequence.
Jordan is his natural charismatic self as a man on a mission, a role he’s played from Black Panther to Creed, and he’s definitely got the brooding down pat by this point. If you’re familiar with Clancy’s work, then you’ll know that too often his protagonists have virtually no weaknesses – he’s a world-class solder, a quick thinker with a quicker trigger and the ability to process minutiae really fast and spit it out as exposition to the audience. He’s fun to watch but difficult to relate to, and at the end gets lost in a massive library of action heroes who we remember by the name of the actor who portrayed them and not the character themselves.
Unfortunately for him (and the audience), it gets boring really fast. It lacks the realism and the plot intrigue of the Jason Bourne series, and considering the original novel published in 1993 featured a plot about the Vietnam War, pimps and a drug ring, it’s also done a poor job of updating that material into something beyond the usual U.S.A. vs. Russia tropes, scummy backroom decision makers and adding a big action sequence – which usually being involves being submerged in water – here and there. I thought we were done with the whole eagle versus bear thing, but clearly, we haven’t quite moved on from the Cold War or the basic plot points of The Sum of All Fears, which was released in 2002.
The kicker after all this is a post-credits scene in which John, now hiding under the alias John Clark – the film does poke fun at how ridiculous this is, which evoked a chuckle from me – and still maintaining high-level connections to various government black ops agencies, proposes a new task force code named “Rainbow,” as in “Rainbow Six,” one of Clancy’s most famous works. If we’re going to build out this Clarkverse (as opposed to the Ryanverse), Amazon will have to really put in extra effort to provide some backstory to its characters and provide far more complex world for them to inhabit – this is Tom Clancy, after all. More cloak, less dagger.
Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse gets two stars out of four.
