Tag: Liev Schreiber

Golda (2023)

Undramatic saga of Middle East history that fails to bring seismic events to life

Director: Guy Nattiv

Cast: Helen Mirren (Golda Meir), Camille Cottin (Lou Kaddar), Liev Schreiber (Henry Kissinger), Rami Heuberger (Moshe Dayan), Rotem Keinan (Zvi Zamir), Lior Ashkenazi (Lt General David Elazar), Dvir Benedek (Major General Eli Zeira), Ed Stoppard (Major General Benny Peled), Dominic Mafham (Lt General Haim Bar-Lev), Emma Davies (Miss Epstein), Ohad Knoller (Major General Ariel Sharon)

I’m sure you couldn’t have picked a worse time to release a film celebrating Israel’s fight against the Arab nations than November 2023. As the world looks on in horror at the latest cycle of violence engulfing Gaza, it hardly feels like the right time to kick back and cheer as Israeli forces fight for their country in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But, even without that, Golda is fatally undermined by being a turgid, dull biopic where despite the volume of events little is made either engaging or interesting.

Golda Meir (Helen Mirren) is Prime Minister of Israel, managing the country’s military response after the combined forces of Egypt and Syria launch a surprise attack on the Golan Heights and Sinai. After intelligence failures leave Israel on the back foot, Meir must plan Israel’s counter-offensive, deal with the moral complexities of sacrificing soldiers, and work diplomatically to ensure the continued support of the US via Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), all while dealing with cancer. All of this is told through the intermittent use of a framing device, where Meir is being interviewed by a 1974 committee investigating those intelligence failures.

Golda is obviously apeing Cuban Missile Crisis political thriller Thirteen Days, with its focus on a tight timeline, generals in cigarette-smoke-filled rooms making tough calls, and the dilemmas faced by an elected leader trying to ensure their country’s survival. Unfortunately, where Thirteen Days mixed history lesson with genuine drama, Golda just feels like it takes thirteen days to watch. How did they manage to make such a seismic conflict as dull as this?

There was a bit of controversy initially on casting the non-Jewish Helen Mirren. That can be largely forgotten, not least because Mirren is by some way the best thing in the film, gravelly and conveying the unbearable pressure on Meir. She even gets to show her human side, with sweet scenes with her loyal assistant (well played by Camille Cottin) and a plate of borsch and an offer for Henry Kissinger (a decent Liev Schreiber). Mirren is caked under various prosthetics but does a good job.

But the rest of the film is a dull mess with its flat, lifeless script singularly failing to add tension or drama. The film feels like a box-ticking exercise, from flat conversations on various troop movements to the casualty figures Meir dutifully records in her notebook. Only rarely does the film bring any of this viscerally to life (such as the increasingly crowded morgue Meir walks through to receive her cancer treatments). Events at the front are given no human face to draw us into the crackly reports coming in over radios, and there is little sense of characters having to debate and choose between different courses of action under huge pressure. Keeping the action contained within just a few indoor locations serves to make the film feel cheap rather than claustrophobic.

Our only glimpse of the front is to see Dayan fly over the Golan Heights (and promptly vomit in guilt). Discussions in briefing rooms get bogged down in establishing who someone is and what they are in charge of, rather than communicating the stakes. So, we get various uniform-clad actors spouting reams of geographical locations, division numbers and military statistics, accompanied by maps where the odd cigarette lighter stands in for various armies. Somehow, despite the volume of talking, its nearly impossible to understand any of this, so poorly is it communicated visually.

That’s before we get started on the film’s one-sided lack of historical context. A brief series of captions that opens the film runs down an Israeli-only perspective of the country’s history. The crucial background of the 1967 war – a pre-emptive strike by Israel that seized the land now being attacked in 1973 – is completely ignored. It’s never made clear that the Arab nations argued they had launched their attack in response to 1967, and no wider context is given.

This feels particularly awkward considering recent events (in late 2023) threw the conflicting narratives in the region even more into the limelight. Both Arabs and Israelis have legitimate cases. But a film that focuses on one side only and whose only Arab voice is a radio intercept of a Syrian gleefully celebrating the “death of the Zionists” hardly feels like it is making a mature and sensitive statement about the Middle East conflict.

It means the film’s final celebration that the war led to the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel – including the recognition of Israel by Egyptian Premier Sadat – rings hollow. Peace, as a topic, is never raised in the course of the film (so hardly feels like a thematically correct ending) and its celebration at the end feels like a fig leaf to suggest an “upbeat” ending, when 1973 was effectively just another round in a war that was to continue (with increasingly horrific impact on civilians on both side) for the rest of all our lifetimes so far.

Golda fails as drama, fails as history and fails as a film. It’s a mess.

Ransom (1996)

Every parent’s nightmare gets tackled in this efficient, smart (but not quite smart enough) thriller from Ron Howard

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Mel Gibson (Tom Mullen), Rene Russo (Kate Mullen), Gary Sinise (Detective Jimmy Shaker), Delroy Lindo (FBI Special Agent Lonnie Hawkins), Lili Taylor (Maris Conner), Liev Schreiber (Clark Barnes), Donnie Wahlberg (‘Cubby’ Barnes), Evan Handler (Miles Roberts), Brawley Nolte (Sean Mullen), Paul Guilfoyle (FBI Director Stan Wallace), Dan Hedaya (Jackie Brown)

There is no greater fear for any parent than losing a child. Doesn’t matter if you are prince or pauper, the same heart-pounding dread is there. But sometimes the risks are greater if you a prince. Because the more money you have, the more likely a kidnapper might think you’d be willing to swop that money to get your kid back.

It’s what kidnappers decide when they take the son of Airline owner Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson). The kidnappers want $2million and no questions asked, in return for his son Sean (Brawley Nolte). Tom and his wife Kate Mullen (Rene Russo) are willing to pay – with the advice of FBI Agent Lonnie Hawkins (Delroy Lindo). But after the first bungled handover, Tom becomes convinced the kidnappers have no intention of returning his son alive. So, he takes a desperate gamble to try and turn the tables, much to the fury of secretive kidnapper (and police detective) Jimmy Shaker (Gary Sinise).

Ransom is a change of pace for Ron Howard, his first flat-out thriller. And it’s a very good one. Ransom has a compulsive energy to it, powered by sharp filming and cutting and some impressively emotional performances from the leads. It also takes a number of unexpected narrative twists and turns – before it reverts to a more conventional final act – and manages to keep the viewer on their toes.

Its main strength is an emotionally committed performance from Mel Gibson. Taking a leaf from Spencer Tracy’s book, this is Gibson at his best, very effectively letting us see him listen and consider everything that happens around him. Mullen is a determined man who plays the odds, and cuts corners only when he must – but is also convinced of his own certainty. He applies his own business learning – of negotiation and corporate deal-making – to this kidnapping, which is an intriguingly unique approach. Gibson’s performance is also raw, unnerved and vulnerable and he plays some scenes with a searing grief you won’t often see in a mainstream movie. Russo does some equally fine work – determined, scared, desperate – and their chemistry is superb.

Howard coaches, as he so often does, wonderful performances from his leads and from the rest of the cast. Gary Sinise turns what could have been a lip-smacking villain into someone chippy, over-confident and struggling with his own insecurities and genuine feelings for his girlfriend (a doe-eyed Lili Taylor, roped into kidnapping). Delroy Lindo is very good as the professional kidnap resolver and there are a host of interesting and engaging performances from Schreiber, Wahlberg, Handler and Hedaya. Ransom turns into a showpiece for some engagingly inventive performances.

Howard also triumphs with his control of the film’s set-pieces. The kidnapping sequence is highly unsettling in its slow build of the parent’s dread. The first attempted exchange is a masterclass in quick-quick-slow tension, with Gibson and Sinise very effective in a series of cryptic phone calls. The ransom phone calls are similarly feasts of good acting and careful cross-cutting, which throb like fight scenes. Howard understands that this is a head-to-head between two men struggling in a game of deadly one-up-manship, both of them constantly trying to figure out not only their next move, but the likely reaction of their opponent.

For much of the first two thirds of the film, Ransom is very effective in its unpredictability. There is a genuine sense of dread for how this might play out and the radical changes of plan both sides of the kidnap play out land events in a very different place than you might expect at the start. The more hero and villain try to out-think each other, the murkier the plot becomes.

It’s unfortunate that the final third devolves into a more traditional goody/baddy standoff with guns, punches and our hero reasserting his control (and the safety of his family) through the fist and the trigger. But then I guess in the 90s you couldn’t have a Gibson film without a bit of action. But when the film focuses on the thinking, talking, slow-burn tension and the sheer terror of parents who have lost a child, it’s a very effective and tense film that stands up to repeat viewings.

Pawn Sacrifice (2014)

Liev Schreiber and Tobey Maguire recreate Spassky/Fischer in Ed Zwick’s pointless chess drama

Director: Ed Zwick

Cast: Tobey Maguire (Bobby Fischer), Liev Schreiber (Boris Spassky), Peter Sarsgaard (Father Bill Lombardy), Michael Stuhlbarg (Paul Marshall), Lily Rabe (Joan Fischer), Robin Weigert (Regina Fischer)

In the 1960s and 70s, Chess suddenly became world news. Like the space race before it, it was effectively a way for the USA and USSR to combat each other without the risky side effect of blowing up the whole world. The USSR had all the best players: until American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer emerged to shatter this monopoly. In 1972 the world seemed to come to a stop to watch the world championship clash between Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber) in Reykjavik. Ed Zwick’s film attempts to bring together the personal and the political – two superpowers using a game as a proxy for war – into an enlightening package. It fails.

The film opens with Fischer trashing his apartment in search for bugs on the eve of the 1972 final before flashing back in time. You’d expect the film to give us an idea of what bought our “hero” to this point. Zwick’s film utterly fails to do this. Now Fischer – very well played by an aggressively prickly Tobey Maguire – was a hugely troubled man. Though never formally diagnosed some combination of paranoia, OCD and a myriad other personality problems meant he was never more than a step away from self-destruction. Despite this he was deeply driven by an ambition to be the best chess player in the world. Its rich material, but the film never begins to get to grips with Fischer.

Could this be because it wants to tell an uplifting story – the film is really building towards the standing ovation Spassky gives Fischer in game 6 at the 1972 championship when Fischer whipped him in about 40 moves of perfect play – but is struggling with the fact that Fischer himself is deeply unsympathetic. A paranoid conspiracy freak who even by the standards of the 1960s was an aggressive, virulent anti-Semite (Fischer would later match Mel Gibson in his anti-Semitic tirades, blaming Zionism for everything from 9/11 down). A bully who refused to interact with anything except on his own terms, who cut all friends and family from his life for the most minor transgressions. There is no insight given here at all, or suggestion of what was wrong with Fischer.

It’s hard to hang a “triumph against the odds” structure – as Zwick’s unimaginative and conventional film tries to – around this. A far more interesting film would have used the 1972 tournament as an Act 2 triumph and then explored in more depth Fischer’s long spiral of self-destruction that would see him as a bearded eccentric ranting against Jews and America, in exile in Iceland. A film like that would also have then been able to properly do service to the idea of Fischer as a pawn of American state interests, who celebrate him when they want to rub the Soviet nose in it, but then drop him as soon as his purpose is served.

Instead, the film becomes formulaic and empty, leaving us with the impression that we learn nothing about Fischer at all. Why did this man of Jewish descent hate Jewish people so much? Was it self-loathing? What motivated him to seemingly self-destruct his own career so regularly? Was it a fear of being beaten? We have no idea. Instead that opening scene of Fischer destroying his apartment tells us everything we learn about the man over the course of the film. He remains an enigma – and since he’s also deeply unpleasant (the film skirts a little around how much) and we don’t get given any rich material to understand why he’s like this, he becomes a tedious figure to spend time with.

Zwick’s film also fails to communicate the cold war motivations behind this. Although there are the odd shots of the powers-that-be watching on TV in the Kremlin and the White House, we get no sense of how or why these powers are using chess to promote their own ideology. The film is endlessly reliable on vintage and reconstructed newsreel footage to constantly tell us directly things it can’t work out how to do with dialogue, from the political situation to chess moves. You learn nothing about the Cold War from this film. Michael Stuhlbarg’s lawyer turned promoter for Fischer states openly that he wants to use Fischer to show up the Russkies – but that blunt statement is it.

Instead the film is only really interesting when it is effectively recreating footage from the 1972 championship. And when a film’s strong points are recreating real events perfectly, you know you are in trouble. Zwick’s film lacks ideas, a compelling plot, insight or invention. It suffers badly today when compared to the far more dynamic and insightful The Queen’s Gambit (whose lead character is a heavily fictionalised female Fischer). Zwick’s film is him at his plodding, middle-brow worst, presenting a would-be epic shorn of anything of actual interest of controversy. The only thing that redeems it are decent performances from Maguire, Sarsgaard and Schreiber. Otherwise, this is an empty mess that tells you nothing at all about anything. You could checkmate it in about four moves.

Spotlight (2015)

Ruffalo, McAdams, Keaton and James head up the investigation into the church in Spotlight

Director: Tom McCarthy

Cast: Michael Keaton (Walter “Robby” Robinson), Mark Ruffalo (Michael Rezendes), Rachel McAdams (Sacha Pfeiffer), Brian d’Arcy James (Matt Carroll), Liev Schreiber (Marty Baron), John Slattery (Ben Bradlee Jnr), Stanley Tucci (Mitchell Garabedian), Billy Crudup (Eric MacLeish), Jamey Sheridan (Jim Sullivan), Paul Guilfoyle (Peter Conley), Len Cariou (Cardinal Bernard Law), Neal Huff (Phil Saviano)

True villains are hard to spot: those clothed in good deeds are particularly well hidden. Few clothe themselves in good deeds more effectively than priests – and the small minority who use their positions of trust and power to abuse vulnerable children. It’s an unforgiveable, abominable betrayal that has ruined the lives of thousands of victims around the world. This century, the Catholic Church was rocked by a scandal: many in the church hierarchy were all too aware of these appalling acts, but protected priests from exposure rather than submitting them to well-deserved punishment. It took the work of crusading journalists to lift this veil and force the Church to begin to change its policy from protecting priests to protecting children.

The story was bought to wider attention by the dedicated work of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team – the US’s finest investigative journalist team, a small team of reporters who work for months at one story. Boston is a firmly Catholic city, where the Church still holds a huge influence over the lives of its population. For years, faint suspicions of misconduct from any of the nearly 1,500 priests in the city was hushed up. It takes the arrival of an outsider at the Boston Globe – the paper’s unassuming new Jewish, Floridian editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) – to push the Spotlight team to delve deeper into this story. He finds plenty of support from the team – respected editor “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), the passionate Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), dedicated and empathetic Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and increasingly disgusted Matt Caroll (Brian d’Arcy James). Using tried-and-trusted journalistic methods, passionate investigation, archival work and winning the confidence of survivors, the team piece together a systematic cover-up by the Catholic Church that extends all the way to the Vatican.

Spotlight scooped the Oscar for Best Picture (along with an Oscar for its brilliantly researched screenplay). It feels like a late Oscar partly awarded in memory of All the President’s Men, the film that Spotlight bears the most relation to. But, even more so than Pakula’s film, this is a low-key, reserved but strikingly effective and engrossing film that takes an almost documentary approach to the patient work required to uncover a story (no Deep Throat here) and the grinding shoe leather needed to get there. Fittingly, given the tragic story the team were reporting on, Spotlight is almost totally devoid of histrionics (there is at best one scene where a member of the team gets angry – only to be met with a quiet “are you done?”), instead being a tribute to the professionalism and integrity of journalists powered, but never overwhelmed by, their anger.

McCarthy’s film is refreshingly free of flourish or over-emphasis. It’s brave enough to let the story speak for itself, and trusts the viewer to understand both the emotional weight of abuse and the feelings of those involved without resorting to dramatic speeches or tearful dialogue. The details dominate – searching through archives for old newspaper clippings, waiting for access to court papers, days spent reading over a decade of parish records. Nothing is earned cheaply: every revelation the result of patient leg-work and following where the story leads without agenda or bias.

Agenda is something these journalists are deeply aware of. All of the team were raised in the faith to one degree or another, with strong roots in a community. The team’s leader, Robby, is an esteemed alumnus of a Catholic school one of the guilty priests worked at when he was a child – a revelation that quietly leads him to question both his implicit turning of a blind eye, but also how only a single man’s choices prevented him from becoming a victim. There is discomfort throughout the Boston Globe at the story – assistant Editor Ben Bradlee Jnr (a fine performance from John Slattery), while supportive of the team, is prickly at revelations that the Globe had previously not followed up reports of abuse and is deeply unhappy at the thought of accusing the Church itself.

The power of the Church in communities like this is subtly, but brilliantly, depicted. The film opens in the 70s with a paedophile priest having his actions being quietly hushed up by the police after the intervention of an ADA. Virtually every important person in the city is a Catholic and, like Robby, has been bought up and schooled in the Church. In exterior shots, McCarthy’s camera constantly frames churches on the edges of shot, their spires visible over residential blocks. The scale of the power of this institution – its reach and influence – is constantly demonstrated. It’s a big challenge for the team to take on – and one which they are not even sure their readers are ready to read about.

But McCarthy’s film isn’t crude. It’s made clear that these priests are a minority – 6% – and the anger is not with faith itself, but with the flawed and wrong decisions taken by men (the psychologist the team consults, an ex-priest, makes clear his faith is not shaken by his discoveries, only his trust in the institution). Equal care is given to the victims themselves. Their stories are reported by two characters in the film, each time with a careful lack of over-emphasis and a quiet, yet emotional, honesty. No attempt is made to sensationalise any of this.

And the film also makes clear that everyone is in some way complicit in this. The Globe has failed to report it. The police and government have covered it up. People might whisper about it – or say a particular priest is “dodgy” – but no one has made an effort to rock the boat and find out about it. Instead, victims are paid off, priests are moved to new parishes and everyone tries to carry on as normal. It’s a grimy and quiet conspiracy – miles away from the Grisham-esque danger the film’s trailer suggested – rather a collective failure of moral responsibility.

The film’s low-key approach, professionalism and absorption in how people do their jobs is deeply engrossing. Few things, after all, are as involving as watching highly professional people execute their jobs flawlessly. The performances are superb. Michael Keaton gives possibly the finest performance of his career – surely connected to it being his most restrained – as the team’s leader, whose sense of personal guilt and regret quietly build along with determination. Ruffalo (Oscar-nominated) is fantastic as his passionate, committed colleague (he gets the one shouting scene). McAdams delivers quiet empathy and powerful intelligence. Schreiber confounds expectations as the numbers man who emerges as a dedicated searcher for the truth.

The truth is exposed – but it’s just a tip of the iceberg. The story might be out there, but as the film shows in its coda, the struggle goes on. Crusading maverick lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci, very good) can’t celebrate the story’s publication – he’s got two child victims he needs to talk to. Cardinal Law (a fine performance of assured, misguided, certainty from Len Cariou) is promoted to the Vatican. Similar scandals emerge across the world. But the problem doesn’t go away. Just as the story needs time and work, the same qualities are needed to reform the Church.

Spotlight is quiet, engrossing and finely moving and triumphant film-making. It focuses brilliantly on professionalism and dedication producing results and shows that hyperbole and embellishment are not needed for outstanding drama. Told with documentary realism, acted with reserved grace and skill, McCarthy’s film is a call-back to 1970s film-making in the best possible way. A deserved winner and a small triumph.

The Butler (2013)

Forest Whitaker takes on a lifetime of service, as the Civil Rights movement meets Downton Abbey

Director: Lee Daniels

Cast: Forest Whitaker (Cecil Gaines), Oprah Winfrey (Gloria Gaines), David Oyelowo (Louis Gaines), Cuba Gooding Jnr (Carter Wilson), Lenny Kravitz (James Holloway), Colman Domingo (Freddie Fallows), Yaya DeCosta (Carol Hammie), Terrence Howard (Howard), Adriane Lenox (Gina), Elijah Kelley (Charlie Gaines), Clarence Williams III (Maynard), John Cusack (Richard Nixon), Jane Fonda (Nancy Reagan), James Marsden (John F. Kennedy), Vanessa Redgrave (Annabeth Westfall), Alan Rickman (Ronald Reagan), Liev Schreiber (Lyndon B. Johnson), Robin Williams (Dwight D Eisenhower)

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) grows up on a plantation in the South; after his mother is raped and his father killed by the son of the house, the family matriarch (Vanessa Redgrave) takes him on as a house servant as a token gesture of regret. His training here sets him on the path to working in a succession of increasingly wealthy hotels and, finally, the White House. Over 30 years, he serves the Presidents in office, never involving himself or commenting on policy, proud of his service to his country. This often puts him in conflict with his Civil Rights activist son Louis (David Oyelowo), with his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) stuck in the middle.

This is the sort of film that feels designed to win awards. It’s based on a vague true story (it changes nearly all the events of course) and it’s about a big subject. It’s got big name actors doing acting. It aims at big themes. What it actually is, is a film that misses its marks. It’s a film that spends time with big themes but has nothing to say about them, or in fact anything interesting to say full stop. It assumes that the historical context will do the work, and leaves it at that. Instead, it settles for trite sentimentality and cliché, personal stories played on a stage that makes those stories seem slight and inconsequential rather than giving them reflective depth.

The biggest problem about the film, leaving aside its heavy-handed sentimentality and mundane predictable storytelling, is that all the way through it feels like we are following the wrong story. It’s such a vibrant and exciting period of history, so full of events, passion and struggle: and instead we follow the story of Cecil, essentially a bland passive character who achieves very little and influences even less. There are vague references to leading “the regular life” and how working in domestic service is like some sort of subversive act to demonstrate the education and hard-working possibilities of the minority, but to be honest it never really convinces.

The film promises that Cecil was a man who had a profound impact on the people he served – but this doesn’t come across at all. Instead, the parade of star turns playing US Presidents are there it seems for little more than box office: we see them speaking about Civil Rights issues or planning policy, but we get very little sense of Cecil having any bond with them. The cameos instead become a rather distracting parade, as if the film was worried (perhaps rightly) that Cecil’s story was so slight and bland that they needed the historical all-stars to drum up any interest in it. It doesn’t help that the cameos are mixed – Rickman, Schreiber and Marsden do okay with cardboard cut-out expressions, but Cusack in particular seems horribly miscast. A braver film would have kept these pointless camoes in the background and focused the narrative on Cecil and his colleagues below stairs, and their struggles to gain equal payment with their white colleagues. This film is seduced by the famous events and names it spends the rest of the time backing away from.

The performance at the centre is also difficult to engage with. Forest Whitaker is such an extreme, grand guignol actor that it’s almost sad to see him squeeze himself into a dull jobsworth such as Cecil. Whitaker seems so determined to play it down that he mumbles inaudibly at great length (it’s genuinely really difficult to understand what he is saying half the time), slouching and buttoning himself into Cecil’s character. It doesn’t come across as a great piece of character creation, more a case of miscasting. Oprah Winfrey does well as his wife, although her character is utterly inconsistent: at times a drunk depressive, at others level-headed and calm. The link of either of these characters to the hardships of life as a Black American or their role in racial politics is murkily unclear.

The star turn of the film – and virtually all its interesting content – is from David Oyelowo, who ages convincingly through the film from idealist to activist to elder statesman. His story also intersects with the actual historical events that are taking place in America and he is an active participant – unlike Cecil the passive viewer, just as likely to switch the TV off as follow the news. Often I found myself wishing the film could follow his character rather than Whitaker’s.

That’s the problem with the film: what point is it trying to make? The film seems to want to honour Cecil’s service in the White house – but the film is a slow journey towards Cecil’s sudden revelation that maybe his son’s campaigning for Civil Rights was the right thing to do. This flies in the face of the film’s tribute to Cecil’s decades of quiet, unjudging service: the film can’t make up its mind whether it wants to salute Cecil for being an unjudging, dedicated servant to a long line of Presidents, or for having the courage to take a political stance towards the end. It’s having its cake and eating it. It’s this shallow lack of stance that finally makes it an empty and rather dull viewing experience.

The Sum of All Fears (2002)

Morgan Freeman and Ben Affleck save the world from nuclear armageddon

Director: Phil Alden Robinson
Cast: Ben Affleck (Jack Ryan), Morgan Freeman (William Cabot), Bridget Moynahan (Dr. Catherine Muller), James Cromwell (President J. Robert Fowler), Liev Schreiber (John Clark), Ciarán Hinds (President Alexander Nemerov), Alan Bates (Richard Dressler), Michael Byrne (Anatoly Grushkov), Colm Feore (Olson), Ron Rifkin (Sidney Owens), Bruce McGill (Gene Revell), Philip Baker Hall (David Becker)

In the aftermath of 9/11, people debated whether that atrocity would lead to a change in how Hollywood made blockbusters. Would the public still have the taste for American landmarks being destroyed in the name of entertainment? I guess the answer was “sure they would”, because less than a year later Baltimore was being wiped out by a nuke in The Sum of All Fears. And people generally did find it entertaining. As they should: this is not a smart film, but it is fun, and with hardly any violence or swearing it’s a perfect “all generations” viewing thriller.

The fourth entry in the on-again, off-again Jack Ryan franchise, a series of loosely connected but enjoyable films based on Tom Clancy’s novels, this reboots the saga after two entertaining airport-novel style films starring Harrison Ford. Ryan (Ben Affleck) is now a young CIA analyst who is suddenly thrust centre stage in the Agency when Alexander Nemerov (Ciarán Hinds) rises to power in Russia. Before he knows it, he is working closely with CIA chief William Cabot (Morgan Freeman) and briefing the President (James Cromwell). Working with agent John Clark (Liev Schreiber), Ryan investigates rogue nuclear weapons in Russia, little knowing that it is part of a fiendish plan by European neo-Nazis, led by Richard Dressler (Alan Bates), to plunge Russia and the US into a nuclear confrontation.

First off the bat, Tom Clancy hated this film. He even does a commentary on the DVD which is a scene-by-scene breakdown of all the things he doesn’t like and the terrible changes he felt had been made from his book. I can see why he’s upset, but this is actually a very entertaining, solid, slightly old-fashioned piece of film-making. Clancy’s books aim to be “a few degrees to the left” of reality, to present something that could happen. This film is more of a Bond movie, not least in its choice of baddies. The book uses Arab terrorists. Wisely (I think) the film changes this to a set of Bond-villain like Nazis, embodied by Alan Bates’ enjoyable scenery-chewing performance as a slightly camp chain-smoking Nazi (“Ze Fuhrer vasn’t crazee. He vas stoopid”). There is even a scene where one of the plotters, Goldfinger-style, announces ’I will have no part in this madness’ only to be swiftly bumped off. Clancy hated it, but it’s something a little different and also enjoyably silly.

Besides, you might have felt there was enough vibe of reality in there for Clancy with the reaction to the big one being dropped on Baltimore. The build-up to this sequence is very well done, cut and shot with tension, and Jerry Goldsmith’s score really effectively helps with this build. It’s also quite shocking to actually see the plan succeed: and the shots of a mushroom cloud over the city are presented with a sombre sorrow. There is probably more Clancy criticism for Ryan’s effortless travel around the irradiated city (and his totally unaffected cell phone) but this sequence is still damn good.

Similarly skilfully done is the reaction of the politicians. Daringly, the US politicians are to a man sweaty, stressed old white guys (Air Force One takes off to the accompaniment of them screaming at each other). One of them even has a heart attack. The American politicians may be reluctant – but they are the fastest to rush towards pushing the button. They are also shown to be hopelessly lacking judgement when it comes to appraising the likely reactions to their decisions: one reassures the President that the Russians won’t respond to a full nuclear strike against military targets! The fast build from angry words to a bombers is terrifically done.

The Russians are similarly twitchy – and unlike the Americans, far more susceptible to bribery and collaboration with our villains – but interestingly their President is the “reasonable man”, whom Ryan (and the audience) respects. Charismatically embodied by that wonderful character actor Ciarán Hinds (the film deservedly brought Hinds to America’s attention and he hasn’t looked back since), Nemerov is the wisest, smartest guy in the room – a realist and level-headed man. Hinds is actually the stand-out in the film, superbly backed up by Michael Byrne as a shady (but surprisingly cuddly) KGB fixer.

The build-up to the remorselessly exciting nuke and aftermath sequences is pretty traditional fare but well directed by Phil Alden Robinson and a very good cast of actors largely deliver in their roles. Affleck at the time was heading into the height of his Bennifer unpopularity: he gives a decent performance as Ryan, but Ford is a tough act to follow and Affleck doesn’t quite have the same “ordinary-joe” quality Ford and Baldwin brought to it earlier. He also doesn’t quite have the leading man charisma the part needs to carry the film (Affleck’s best work is as a character actor, but he is trapped by his leading man looks). Fortunately Morgan Freeman, calmly contributing another of his wise mentor roles, offers sterling support. Schreiber and Cromwell are also good in key roles.

This is a very traditional, quite old-school thriller, inspired by a combination of Goldfinger and 1970s political thrillers. It’s not a special film – and not even the best in the franchise – but it is invariably entertaining, has a host of well-done scenes, and barrels along. Robinson also has an eye for tension in smaller sequences – a marvellously tense scene simply involves Ryan trying to get a card swipe machine to work – although he is less confident with some of the action. But in showing how quickly our trigger happy masters can push towards Armageddon, this is a film that seems to be endlessly relevant. And wouldn’t you rather have Nemerov of even Fowler running the US than Trump?