Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

(PG-13)

**

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Smartphone viewing is changing the look of today’s run-of-the-mill thrillers, said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. “A jumbled blur of dizzying close-ups, revolving camera moves, and hand-held action sequences,” the latest addition to the two-decade-old Jack Ryan franchise will probably look great on the 5-inch touch screens where a lot of daily commuters will ultimately see it. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as intelligent as its hero—a covert CIA agent invented by novelist Tom Clancy—is supposed to be. Chris Pine has stepped into the lead role, and he proves “good enough,” in his own “smoldery-swaggery way,” said Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe. But the “giddily preposterous” screenplay tries to revive Cold War animosities by pitting Ryan against a Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) who’s bent on somehow pushing a post-9/11 U.S. into a second Great Depression. As the plot thickens, we get plenty of car chases and hand-to-hand combat, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. But the end result is “something reliably, even insistently, not new.”