Espionage Watch: Patriot Games (1992)

Watched:  05/23/2026

Viewing:  First

Format:  Amazon?

Director:  Phillip Noyce

So, I don't really know how I missed this one back in the day.  No idea.  Harrison Ford.  James Earl Jones.  A Tom Clancy adaptation.  Honestly, I think I was at a 6-week-long drama camp because that's how cool I was in high school.

But I have now seen Patriot Games (1992) and it's kinda fine.  It's not my favorite.

Movies like these were prime dad viewing in the 1990's.  Men in ties would look grim and look at technology and go to board rooms.  They'd use real world issues and events and movements and tell a story that seemed wildly plausible, from a certain point of view.  The Cold War was absolutely a wild time, and it showed up in big, thick books by Tom Clancy that dads read in business trips.

This movie pits a splinter group of the IRA against - very specifically - Jack Ryan.  We met Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October as Alec Baldwin in 1990, but Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford, so I guess if you want even more money, you swap out actors.  I am not going to try to make sense of the continuity.  (Jack Ryan is now John Krasinski).

Anyway - I don't know if this movie makes any sense.  And Jack Ryan in this movie is such a Mary Sue.

First - somehow this Not-IRA group seems to be ready to execute a cousin of the Queen of England when Jack Ryan single handedly rushes in and takes out the whole operation.  Like - they have guns. 

Ryan kills one of the Not-IRA guys and it's the brother of Sean Bean (so you know he's gonna die).  Bean, for some reason, takes it super personal that Jack Ryan killed his brother and swears revenge.  But - why?  Like, Ryan was just trying to keep someone from getting murdered by masked gunmen.  So, fair enough - Bean's character who is a professional killer somehow sees the death as an injustice.  

He makes it abundantly clear this is all he cares about as he's sprung from jail - and somehow the rest of his crew of revolutionaries is like "stop being weird, but go ahead and use our resources to fly people back and forth between North Africa and Maryland trying to kill Jack Ryan, an American.  Definitely perform terrorist activities on American soil near Washington DC.  And get a body count going while you do it so you draw the eye of the CIA to what we're doing."

I kind of think none of this makes any sense and the head not-IRA guy would know they either cut Sean Bean loose or put him in a shallow grave.  Dude is a massive liability if your group's aim is to get freedom for Northern Ireland by making England too freaked out to function.*  Instead Sean Bean's revenge boner becomes some weird vendetta everyone gets involved in.

It seems like these guys were trying to lose.  

Also, suddenly the not-IRA is *not* trying to kill Lord Guy Man.  They're going to kidnap him?  On US soil? 

Sigh.  I found this movie deeply frustrating.  And this was on top of the movie making Jack Ryan The Best at Everything.  He is the Best at killing not-IRA.  He is the best at spotting not-IRA.  He is better than the Counter Terrorism experts focused on the IRA at doing that.  It's kind of ridiculous.

In Red October, Jack Ryan was the actual expert and was asked to be there, and he plays a pretty straightforward role in the events as they unfold.  He is not the Swiss Army Knife of plot management.

I guess I wasn't a huge fan, but it have Anne Archer, so that's a plus.

I know a lot of people told me they loved this movie back in the day.  Sorry.  It just didn't add up for me, even in a 1990's context.  

  

*I won't get too much into the actual situation in Northern Ireland, but it didn't make sense to me then or now because Americans just don't grok Protestant/ Catholic violence.  We reserve that for other non-Christian religions and we're kind of monsters in that regard.