Bulwark Takes - Is ‘Clear and Present Danger’ the Best ’90s Action Flick?

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

JVL, Sarah and Sonny take on Clear and Present Danger—a ’90s thriller packed with politics, cartels, and one of the best action scenes ever filmed. How does it hold up today? Watch as we debate the movie’s politics, Clancy’s worldview, and whether Harrison Ford gave us the best Jack Ryan on screen.

Grab a coffee and discover non-stop action with BudMGM Casino. Check out our hottest exclusive. Friends of one with Multi-Drop. Once even more options. Play our wide variety of table games. Or head over to the arcade for nostalgic casino thrills only available at BetMGM. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Bullwark Movie Club. Make sure to hit like and subscribe. I want to get this out of the way first because sometimes I forget at the end. We are here today to talk about a movie that is weirdly relevant to our moment, but also just amazingly fun to watch, clear and present danger.

The Philip Noy adaptation of the Tom Clancy, a 1989 novel of the same name, stars Harrison Ford in his second and final appearance as Jack Ryan, final appearance of James Earl Jones in the series. The single greatest action setpiece of the 1990s. I'll make that case. I'll make that case. Amongst other things. I know exactly which one you're going to talk about. Everybody, everybody knows, Bush. There's him hanging from the, is it him hanging from the chopper?

No. No, the SUV convoy. Oh, where they, they rocket them? Yeah. It's great. That's a great, that's a great sequence there. Oh, my goodness. The setup of the movie is pretty straightforward.

drug dealers kill one of the president's friends, and the president wants revenge. But he can't just say, I want revenge. So there's all sorts of weird internecing sub rosa conflicts in the bureaucracy, so they can take the revenge. It was a different time. Today, the president could just say, I want revenge. Different time.

The president would just go on Fox News today and say, I want the military to kill all these drug dealers. And it would happen, probably. No rules. It would be fine. But then, so in this movie there's there's a lot of all this this is a classic like tn t classic sort of movie where i you you can turn on any 15 minutes of this movie and indeed i did not see this movie all the way through

until maybe like five or ten years ago like i don't think i ever actually sat down and watched the movie from start to finish until fairly recently but i'd seen all of it i'd seen all of it because it played all the time sarah'd never seen it before this but that i never that that does not surprised me as much. That does not, that does not surprise me. Because I actually was pretty sure I had seen it. And you loved it, right? It was one of these movies where I sat down to watch it. And I was like, oh, this is different than the one I thought I was going to watch. And, uh, were you thinking of Patriot games? I think I was thinking of Patriot games. But what is, what is the, is that the other Jack Ryan one? That's the Irish,

Jack Ryan one. Yeah. Uh, right. And does Thorough Wurch play his daughter in that one too? Yes. Yes. Oh, interesting. Well, in any event, I will say, though, to your TMT point, when I got to the very end, I suddenly was like, well, I do feel like I've seen this part before. But anyway, if I have seen it before in its entirety, I did not remember it. And the whole time was like, I don't know what's going to happen.

It keeps you on your toes. There's twists and turns. There's twists and turns. Great acting in this movie. Great performances. Harrison Ford, of course, is, like, Harrison Ford is my name. number one, if I was drafting movie stars, Harrison Ford might be like my number one movie star, movie star, not necessarily actor, but movie star. He just has this amazing run

through the 80s and 90s and early aughts that can't be beaten. And he is perfect as Jack Ryan. He plays him as a total Boy Scout. JBL, I want to ask you a question because I am not a Jack Ryan reader. I don't read, I have not read any of the Tom Clancy books. I've not read any of them. What is your take on Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan? So I am a Clancy Stan, and I have read all of the books in which Clancy – that's not sure. I have read every book that Clancy wrote. I think I've read every book that Clancy had a part in writing, but I stopped reading the books once he no longer wrote them, and it was just his name on them. So once it became Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, read by –

Right. I hopped off of those. Ryan is a Boy Scout, and he is this weird combination of, because he was a Marine, he joined the Marines, but he washed out of Marine training very, very early because he's in helicopter accident, and his back gets broken. And so he sort of has this lingering back issue his whole life. and also has a fear of flying because he was in a helicopter that crashed. And so this is a recurring theme from him. And so he sort of reinvents himself as a nerd.

He goes and gets a Ph.D. and becomes a historian and winds up getting recruited into the CIA kind of by accident. And he's, he's like a part, sometimes he's into the CIA all the way. Sometimes he's just a part-time consultant. He winds up as president as you go deeper and deeper into the series. He winds up at one point. He's tapped to become, he winds up his director. to the CIA. Then he winds up being tapped to be vice president

and then there is a terrorist attack on the capital during the state of the union address in which somebody flies a jumbo jet into Japanese terrorists still still smarten after the World War II defeat and loyal to the emperor

crash a jet into the capital and they kill basically everybody except for Ryan. And so Ryan then becomes president. Wait, when did that book come out? Did that book come out around the same time as Michael Crichton's rising sun, perhaps? Because there's this, there's this long stretch of like real, like, the Japanese are coming to take over. I think this was after that.

I think there's also, wasn't there a whole series that was based on the idea of you're the guy that runs everything if the rest of them dies? Yeah, designated survivor. Designated survivor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have thought that the Harrison, so we get the Alec, so have you seen Hunt for October, Sarah? Yeah. Yeah. So that is our Alec Baldwin, Ryan. And I've always preferred the, prefer the Harrison Ford Ryan because he's less slick. Like Alec Baldwin is just Alec Baldwin and I like his Jack Ryan. But Harrison Ford feels a little, there's that like. like the level of, oh, where's my pencil? You know, that like absent-minded professor thing going on with him, which he was present in Indiana Jones and he brings to Jeff Ryan. I mean, that's, that's exactly it, right?

It's, it's the, it is that kind of Indiana Jones delivering the lecture and getting distracted by the coeds or it's, you know, when he's, when he's telling the president, when he's giving the president his advice on how to handle the questions about his friendship with this guy. and he's kind of stammering and he like accidentally kind of says out loud like oh no don't do that like it's just it's this perfect it's this perfect performance and he does he just does so much with like he has the perfect like sheepish grin nobody has a better sheepish grin than harrison ford that is it is like his defining characteristic you surely are a lover of harrison ford yes uh yeah sure uh i do like harrison for very much yeah he's uh he's fine it's great he's not he's not he's not he's not I don't spend, you know, honestly, he's really good right now in the show shrinking. He is, it's lovely to see him again. He's still got that scar on his chin. I think Harrison Ford's wonderful. I'm not, you know, honestly, because my kids are doing so much Star Wars right now, I'm pretty, Han Solo is looming large.

We haven't watched Indiana Jones, so I haven't revisited that in a while. And you love Han Solo, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know what, JVL, I don't care for Star Wars that much. It's fine. It's fine. The way that, that, that, that, you know, I'll just really quickly, we went to Disneyland. We let the kids make lightsabers.

It was just my boys who are 9 and 7. I got a light saber in the corner over there. And a whole bunch of grown men who on my desk right now getting their little, little mandolian, uh, talking about their tiber. Little baby Yoda. And I was like, I mean, I guess it's good for men to have hobbies. I don't know. Whatever.

Here's what I liked about clear and present danger. There were two things that I remember being like, you know what? This is part of why the 80s and 90s were different than what happened sort of in the very late 90s. It started to turn in the early aughts. It really revved up, which is heroes were heroes, right? He is not an anti-hero. He is not complicated in a, and I don't mind complicated heroes, but he's not, he's not plagued by the darkness, right? He is somebody who has a clear sense of right and wrong.

That clear sense of right and wrong drives him throughout the sort of machinations of the government machine. He cuts through them with his moral clarity and his inability to be swayed by either. the pomp and circumstance of the White House or the or even their threats and entreaties of, I'm going to bail you out. I will, I will take care of you if you keep this secret. He is a no, sir, I will not do that because what you were asking me to do is wrong. And so I do love and miss the days of heroes. The other thing that is just so clear in this movie that you, I don't even think could get made today. because it wouldn't make sense to anyone is the idea that our government has checks and balances that are sincere, that are serious.

Like, he was like, Mr. President, I am reporting you to the Senate Oversight Committee. And the president is like, oh, no, you won't because I will be going to bribe you right now. Instead of being like, the Senate Oversight Committee, you know, what are they going to do to me? Like, the president is genuinely afraid of that oversight. And, you know, we don't have to know which party the president is in, which party the Senate oversight committee might be in. Because we just assume at that point in time that whichever party is in charge of the Senate Oversight Committee, they will hold them accountable for this illegal war they have waged out of their own sense of retaliation. And so both of those things to me felt very, like, whenever I think, and J.B.L. and I talk about this a lot about the time in which we grew up,

this sort of feels right to me, a time in which we had both straightforward heroes and a sense of the American government, which it isn't that it was absent corruption. It was that their corruption was happening, but it was not so replete that the corrupt could escape accountability. And people still had to pretend to try not to do the corruption, right? I mean, the hip- So hypocrisy existed in like the vice tribute to virtue way. And, you know, obviously the thing which is real is we are currently running kind of an illegal, not a war, but like an illegal operation against persons in the waters of Venezuela, in which we're blowing up boats. And it's not clear that there is any legal authority for these actions. I mean, all the reporting around it has suggested that nobody in the military has been able to divine a legal authority.

And the White House's position is that we do not need to provide one, which is, like, it's funny because so what we're seeing is something very like the, I forget the name, what is it, the knife, you know, the knife strikes, the name of the strike force and right. We're seeing something kind of like that. I mean, not exactly, but kind of like that, right? There's, you know, eye in the sky above dropping, you know, ordinance on things. But in clear and present danger, in that world, the idea is like, oh, well, we have to create a controlling legal authority. And we got to get a piece of paper to show that I, you know, I, Bob Ritter, I, the national security advisor. I need to have these things showing that this thing is legal. Or that you ordered it because you're not going to leave.

order right right right right and now we just live in a world where i was like yeah i don't think there is one whatever drug dealers you just say drug dealers no it's it's in tifa they're in tifa it is it's it is wild because they're as you say uh jviel there's a whole sequence in the film that's not in the original john millia's script which we we may discuss a little more in a bit but the uh there there's a sequence where he goes in front of the oversight committee where jack ryan goes in front of the Oversight Committee. And the oversight committee is like, no troops, no troops. We're not doing troops.

And he's like, no, we're not doing troops. And he means it because he does, he's like, no, we're not going to have any troops there. Why would we have troops there? That's not what we're doing right now. And then when he finds out he's been lied to, he gets mad about it. And he fixes the problem. And I do think part of part of our issue today is that I don't think people get mad enough about being lied to,

just being lied to all the time and don't do anything about it. It's wild. Yeah, well, I mean, doesn't, doesn't Cutter, I forget if it's Cudder or Ritter who says to Jack Ryan, he says, you know, what are you talking about it?

You're up to this thing, you're up to your eyeballs in this. You testified under oath to the committee that there were no troops. As if, like, I don't know, like, we live in a world where Cash Patel testifies under oath committees. Robert Kennedy Jr. testifies under oath to committees. Everybody knows they're lying when they do it. The senators know they're lying. And in fact, call them and say, you're lying to me right now. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Like, it's a very funny, it's like a glimpse

into a foreign country. Ritter even tries to coach him. Like, here's how you get out of it. You just say you don't remember. Nobody even bothers with that anymore. Nobody even bothers with that while I can't recall anymore. It's just like, yeah, whatever. Anyway, no, but this is one reason why we were doing the show is because of the, it kind of coincided with that first strike on a random, possibly narcotics dealers, boat. We don't, we don't really know. But yeah, no, it's, it is, it is relevant and relevant to what we're seeing here. So I'm sorry, Sarah, You seemed unimpressed by the SUV assault in Bogota because that, that, I just, that sequence, that whole sequence is just a perfect action sequence. It's not that I was unimpressed, although I will say, this movie had a lot of the hallmarks of bad guys get to take 1,000 shots and never hit the hero.

heroes turn around and take one shot and take the guy off the room. Oh, yeah. Just like in Star Wars. It's just like, you're making a perfect encasing of me around in bullets, the bullets, even though I'm sitting right here. But when I shoot at you, you just fall over. So there's a little bit of that in that sequence. I did think it was cool. And like the lead up to it where the most.

motorcyclist who's supposed to be protecting the envoy first shoots the real motorcyclist who's protecting the envoy and then becomes the person and they've got the whole setup where the buses come and essentially trap these guys in an alley and then the guys come up on the roof with rocket launchers and start hurtling the rockets into the envoy and so they're they're of course they're hitting the ones that are near where our main characters are um but uh event Eventually, our guys get away by doing what is a cool. It was a cool car trick. Sometimes it's just when you watch some of this stuff for the first time with a modern sensibility. I think sometimes it can be a little hard to see how cool the stagecraft is because it still looks old. Like the thing that he does where he backs up and he turns and he goes through the tunnel that he's seen. You're wounding me. I mean, well, it's like it's, that's just a world.

in which we haven't had 10 Fast and Furious movies. Oh, my God. All right, I got to stop this. So the one thing I'll say just on the craft of that sequence, aside from it being perfectly edited and perfectly shot and perfectly choreographed, Sarah, is that the score for it builds. Oh, I was going to say the score on that is so good. The score from it, it builds not just from the moment where the FBI director gets off the airplane,

and it very slowly but steadily ramps. up. James Horner's score here is perfect. But it also it hits the right notes as you're kind of cutting across back to America where Joaquin de Alameda, his character, one of the great villains of 1990s and early off cinema, Joaquin de Alameda, is finishing up his business in America. It cuts back and forth. It just is, it's such a perfectly propulsive piece of

filmmaking that like, I'm, almost surprised Hans Zimmer didn't do it, frankly. It's like, it's very Hans Zimmer, like, kind of insisting upon itself, but in a way you appreciate it. It just is perfect. It goes right through. Did you cry during that scene, Sarah? Because I cry every damn time.

You cry during the when they're shooting at the cars? Yeah, and his buddy, the FBI, his FBI buddy, that's Agent Dan, who's a character throughout almost all the books. He's a long-time friend of Jacks, and he gets it. And the directs

the director gets it and he's he's he's he's jack brian he's he's all he's got is a service pistol that isn't even his own and he's firing back at these narco terrorists with their RPGs and he's all he's got is a little saying he's just trying runs out to try to try to pick up the body of his fallen kind of they're sheltering in the little hacienda and oh it gets dusty i will say dusty every time i'll say the one the one moment of that sequence that like i've always been kind of like, okay, that doesn't quite track for me, is when he burst through that little tunnel to the other side, and it's just like, all right, it's over.

And no one's there. Yeah. It's over. It's done. They didn't, they didn't think to run to the other side of the roof. It's like a flash flood. These things go away as soon as they materialize. I don't know. I got to say, I found that whole sequence it was fine. And maybe if I watched it in this, but I didn't, I didn't sit there and like, God, this

is magical. All right. I have to ask, I have to ask her um so the uh god help me here her is you i have to ask you the actor who plays the cartel kingpin who i am just blanking on right now eskabato eskabato the guy who plays eskabato is uh miguel sandibal sandavall yeah sarah since you had never seen this before you were seeing him that actor for the first time with your residual image being his amazing work on Seinfeld with Little Jerry, the rooster, right? And so did you, did you have that cognitive distance? Wait a minute, where's Little Jerry? He's not scary. He's a funny guy. Because when I, you know, I saw this first.

And when he then popped up on Seinfeld, I was just like, what? What's he doing here? Is he going to murder Jerry with a baseball bat? No, but you know, Sarah, you, I assume you were a, you're a Breaking Bad fan. I am a breaking bad fan. Which is, of course, there's a, what's his name? What's the character's name? What's Raymond Cruz's character's name? Tucco. He, the, Tucco, shows up here as one of the, one of the, the soldiers under Benjamin Bratt's command.

Benjamin Bratt, also great. Benjamin Bratt is great. And there's a lot of people in this. Like, Willem Defoe is in it. So it was one of those movies where I, as I sat down, I sort of knew it was going to be Harrison Ford and, But immediately, I was like, look at all the people who were in this, who are really fun to see, especially at that age. Like, it has the guy in it who went on to be one of the doctors. And he's sort of, he's actually in a lot of stuff.

He's, like, kind of not attractive as a proposition. Oh, no, no, he was a lawyer. He was a lawyer on Allie McBeal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Petey, Pedy, Greg German, German. Yeah, Greg German. And he's one of the analyst buddies. He's one of the, like, part of what is fun I thought about this movie was like watching

them crack the code with the 1980s technology, like the enormous computers and the floppy isks. Enhance. It was, that was really, that's fun. That's like time capsule stuff in a way that, because normally even when you go back, you're like, okay, the phone immediately dates it, like their sat phones, immediately date a movie. But getting to watch them do like,

procedural FBI work with their computers. Like whenever that guy German or PD is trying to guess the password and he cracks it with like birthdays. Like seven tries. Can we talk a little bit about the politics of the movie? Right after

I, since we're doing a random shoutout time, Ted Ramey, Ted Ramey Sam Ramey's brother who is a character actor he shows up and stuff. Ted Ramey as the like bomb analyst. He's like No, a bomb would leave a crater like this. This is clearly a car bomb. There's no, there's no shrapnel.

There's none of the shrapnel everywhere. It just, I love, I love, again, just another perfect kind of that guy moment. And we'll have an entire conversation about Henry Zerney later. Yes. For me, we'll get to Henry Jernie and Ritter. Well, and James Earl Jones. Oh, James and Jones. And I mean, it's got, it got so many people in it.

But wait, you said, Graham and Cruz, yeah, Greg German, Benjamin, Benjamin, and Brat. Anne Archer. Anne Archer, what a beauty. Yeah. Kind of wasted in this movie. Just not really much for her. She doesn't get as much as she gets to do in Patriot Games.

And Patriot Games, she gets a lot more work. Patriot Games is like a family. He has to protect his family. They're just kind of at home for this movie. One of the reasons I love the casting of Anne Archer here is so one of the keys to understand Jack Ryan is that he's rich as fuck. Yeah. So he, uh, after he

breaks his back and he gets his PhD and then he goes to work on Wall Street. He makes a pile of money and then he marries the daughter of the guy who owns his hedge fund. And Anne Archer is a beautiful woman, but

she is a beautiful woman in a very specific kind of way that really does feel like she comes out of New York society. You know, like she, She looks like she could be the daughter of one of the masters of the universe, you know, who... But she herself is a doctor. Yeah, she's a surgeon. So she's an eye surgeon, right.

And she's very, you're right, there's a gentility to her that makes you look like she was raised well and poised and walked with a book on her head at some point and has perfect teeth and perfect hair. but she also looks real in some way, accessible, like a person you would see and know. She's amazing in this movie. He's also very clearly, they are very clearly, they have a very good marriage, like a very, one of those marriages that you saw where you're like, well, this is a marriage you build worlds upon.

Just a real commitment to each other. Even in the little bit that you have here, You can tell he is a person whose family is at the center of his world. I'm glad you're saying all this. I was a little worried, Sarah, that this was going to be another. This also kind of falls into the guy movie, very much a movie about guys doing guy things. Well, there are two women in it. There are two women and women.

There is Mrs. Jack Ryan and Moyer. The machine is still on, Moira. No, no, no, that's not true. That's not true. the head of the field office there in Columbia Oh yeah, that's right That is a woman

I actually was sort of It's funny It's the throwback in the sense That everybody has secretaries And the secretaries And the secretaries All have this You know

These like weird relationships With their bosses Like Moira You look nice today Yeah Well that's right Harrison Ford does this thing Anybody says it very nicely

Uh Actually I thought that was a nice thing I thought it was like This is a way where they are communicating That this is a nice human Oh, but it's, but it's also very clearly, like, a trick that Jack Ryan is doing there to, like, get her to stop paying attention to this. Like, he doesn't want her to think about what has happened here. He's just like, oh, hey, nice. You look nice today. But the, but there's, it's a honeypot thing, but like a reverse honeypot where the, the bad guy, uh, basically seduces the secretary of one of the CIA agents, um, only to murder her, uh, which was the FBI director.

It's the secretary of the FBI. Yeah. And but and so she doesn't get, she isn't and so she's sort of a patsy in the whole thing. But I thought that I actually quite liked this, the woman who ran the field office. Because she's sort of this short. You want to spend more time with her, don't you? Yeah, she actually, that character feels like it's lived in in a way that the movie doesn't demand, but is rewarding. But, but this is where one of the things I'll say about the movie is,

I was, for a movie from the 80s, it's a movie that people would criticize today as being woke for as many, I think, like actually to have the doctor, like his wife be a surgeon at this point in time, which was true to the time, but I'm not sure you're independently wealthy. You're both, you've got sort of young kids, the wife's a surgeon. I was actually surprised how many women sort of, then there's like a woman running the CIA office. I don't know. I bet at the time, like, that was at a different time where people

are, like, we need to help, we need to start, like, push, putting more of these images on things. And Tom Clancy was a reactionary, so he could do that without being accused to being woke. But there's also a lot of, like, black characters that are very real. Obviously, the James Earl Jones character. So I just think, like, if this movie was today, the way that it is a Benetton ad of, of different sort of men, women, to various colors. whatever. I think that it would be conceived of as woke. This isn't how this would be. Well, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, the Moira character today would be very harshly criticized from the left for it's, she, she gets fridged is what happens there.

She gets, it's the term that you use for when a, it's usually when a girlfriend or love interest, but whatever, but like she basically, she serves one purpose and that is to die in the, in the movie, um, to give away information and die. Fridged? What is that? What is that? Fridged. It's, it's, it's, good luck. It is a reference to a comic book girlfriend in the early 1990s who was murdered and shoved into a fridge so her boyfriend, the Green Lantern at the time, would discover it. That was like, people got very mad about it. It became a whole, became a whole actual trope, a term people, it's called fridging. F-R-I-D-G. Is when you is when you have a female character only to have her killed as the impetus for why the male character does things. Yes. Yes. I see that.

Yeah. So that would that would be, that would be very controversial today. But it, you know, back back then it was fine. JBL, could you, could you talk a little bit about the differences between the book and the movie? And we can't, can we do Ritter and Henry Charnie now? Yeah, we can. So the book is, I mean, obviously books are more sprawling. I think this is a fantastic adaptation, and it does what all great adaptations do, which is it's not faithful in, like, the most serious ways, but it tells it, he tells the story in the way the film version of it needs to.

And the big difference for here is I want to zoom in on the Henry Zarnie's character. So Henry Zarnie's character is Bob Ritter. He is the director of operations. The way the CIA is structured is you have the director of the CIA and then the CIA split underneath between intelligence and operations. And intelligence are basically analysts who are collecting humint and sadint and eint and all that stuff. And the operations are the spooks who go out into the field and do stuff. And there's basically a wall between them. Those two silos have historical, like in-service rivalries.

and that is a big part of the book that does make it sway into you do get a sense that Ritter doesn't like Ryan and he doesn't really like Ryan in the book either but what's interesting is that in the in the movie there are three villains really and it isn't Escobedo right Escobar is just he's like a wild animal right he's a drug kingpin he does what he does. The real villains are the president, who is a coward, the national security advisor, who is a weakling, and then Ritter, who is just sort of going along with everything, right? And Cortez. And Cortez. Yeah, I guess Cortez. But Cortez is like such a good villain. You almost kind of like just want to spend more time with him. But in the book,

the Henry Zerney character, Ritter, he does. He doesn't like Jack Ryan. And the reason he doesn't like Jack Ryan is because he believes that people like Ryan from the analysis side don't actually care about the lives of the guys who are in the field from ops. And he is one of these guys who will actually die to protect his field agents. And he is part of the effort to bring in the guys down in the operation once they're cut off. And so Ritter is like a really, you know, crinkly, rough and abrasive figure who is ultimately on the side of the angels. And the choice of Henry's, I mean, Henry's Ernie is so perfectly administrative. Like, I don't even know how to describe his screen presence because it's such a unique thing that he does.

But like this and in the Mission Impossible movies where he's, well, no. Right, right. He's he is Kittritch, what, two years later in Mission Impossible, the first Mission Impossible. And they are very similar roles. They are very similar in that he's kind of this officious. He enunciates very clearly. And he speaks in this, I can't even, I'm not even going to try and mimic his speech patterns are amazing, aren't they? He speaks in this very explicit and direct way that also, I have never heard anybody talk that way before.

It's, it's really, it's great stuff. Sarah's looking at us like we're insane. Did he not make as much of an impression on you on screen? No, he made he made some impression, maybe not this much of an impression. I actually sort of thought he was one of the more the characters where they were clearly trying to tell you something with him. But like it never really went anywhere or as much as you would want for as much screen time as you got with them like looking at each other and clearly not liking each other. And then I'll say, I can't, this movie. to me is a much better in the genre like you jumping to the mission impossible movies is like

i i that's i don't do my comparisons with mission impossible movies because god do i not care about those movies are you uh wait so it's interesting but it's actually literally my favorite series of movies in existence well they're no fast and furious the uh sarah the um watch those either i'm just saying like the cool car stuff now is No, but Sarah, it's interesting to hear you say that about Ritter, about him not quite adding up for you, because I do think, I think there is a problem there with the character. And it's funny, I mentioned I read the original Milius script as I was, you know, doing, as I was praying for this. And Ritter is not in that script. Ritter is, Ritter does not exist in the original version of this script. And what's interesting is a lot of his lines in the movie are sort of. still in this script. They're just attributed to Jack Ryan, interestingly, and Cutter. Oh. And so Ritter, Ritter weirdly serves as this kind of sin-eater figure for both Ryan and Cutter and Clark. He just takes on like all of the negative attribute, Willam Defoe's character, Clark,

who's running the secret op down in, um, in South America. Mr. Clark's not actually his real name. He's fat. We knew a whole thing on Mr. Clark if you want to. Well, I, I'm, I'm curious to get your take on this. But, but to your point, Sarah, I think the reason the reason the character does not work, I actually kind of agree with you that the character is, is slightly underdeveloped because he mostly exists to make all of the other characters look a little bit better. He, like, he, he, he moves the plot forward in certain ways, and he moves the thematic underpinning of the film forward, about the, like, sneakiness of this whole operation and how everybody's just trying to cover their ass, etc. But he does it by just kind of,

absorbing all of the bad things. He's like the sponge that is in the sink for six months and is like kind of black and gross and you can't really use it anymore. That's him in this movie. And I, it is a mild problem. I think, I think Serney covers it up by being just delivering a totally magnetic performance. But, but yeah, I think the character does not quite work. You are never quite sure. Like when they're, when he and Harrison Ford are staring at each other angrily as they both go into their own offices, but they're, but they're, been, like, sort of detailed together. I was just like, I don't know. I don't understand the dynamic that play here that we are supposed to be understanding. You didn't find them. I cried at that scene, too. Files riveting.

Yeah, with the printing, watching the daisy wheel printer going across, I also got a tear. Wow. Just like, I cry a lot during this movie. Have you seen, like, terms of endearment or beaches? Like, what happens to you during those? It didn't really, didn't really hit me. Barbara Hershey, beaches. It doesn't really work for me.

Sure. Okay. Movie Club is we're going to watch some of these. I'm going to show you what it means. To feel. What it means to feel? I don't know. Can we do the politics? Yes.

So I'm very interested to talk to you guys about the weird. So Clancy is a very, very, very conservative guy. Reactionary, some might say. very much a Cold Warrior, a Reagan worshipper, was a real sort of folk hero in the Republican world for much of the 80s and 90s. And this movie is interesting, and the book is interesting, because he hates drugs.

And he's not a libertarian, but he's very skeptical of the war on drugs. And so it lives in this interesting place where, like, conservatism hasn't figured out what it really thinks about all this stuff, right? Like it, and, and the other thing here

is that Clancy is toying with the idea of the limits of power, which is, again, not really his bag. His bag is like, America's got the greatest Navy in the world. We can make anything happen. And this is a... Do you want to know how

a cellulose bomb works? Right. This is like, you know, oh, this, look, It's Vietnam again, you know. And so there's like this interesting undercurrent of conservative worldview stuff happening in it that I was interested in what you guys thought about it. Well, I definitely clocked the jelly beans on the president's desk, which to me seemed like an obvious homage. I did wonder, and unfortunately, I didn't have the time, but I meant to go and look at the timeline between this and the Oliver North. I mean, Oliver North must have been before this, right? Because I would say it felt...

This is the 90s. Yeah, right. So it was the 90s, not the 80s. Right. It was written in 89. Published in 89. So shortly after the Oliver North. So that's what it reminded me of.

Like, I felt like this was a covert operation that, you know, it's unclear what the approval is for it. does it go all the way to the top? Who's getting hung out to dry? I'd bet anything that Clancy liked North. Well, that's why it's interesting that you just said that. I didn't know that. But that's to look that up. Like, we are talking about the resonance sort of of.

And honestly, part of the reason I got so surprised by the movie is I was sure it was going to have something to do with bombing a boat. Because that was, that's the like current historical parallel. And then when I was like, oh, no, there is a boat. It does start with the Navy. But that's not actually, that kicks off the action, but it is not a central issue in the story is like whether or not they are legally or illegally bobbing boats. It is a question of, are they legally or illegally, you know, sending American troops, like a small band of American troops to like carry out a covert operation? I don't know if this is real.

I'm sorry, I'm just looking on the internet while we're talking and I see one substack. claiming that Oliver North used a fake Irish passport and his pseudonym was John Clancy. And by it. And by the way, did you guys catch that Oliver North and Fawn Hall got married? I did see that. Oh, I saw that. Yeah.

That was the weirdest thing in the world, wasn't it? Like two figures from history who everybody, I think, probably assumed had passed on. And it turns out that now, after 40 years, they've tied the knot at like age. What a weird man. they're tied together by destiny.

But wait, did you guys see the Iran-Contra parallels here? Did that not seem like it loomed over this movie? Yeah. Yeah, totally. With the Senate hearings, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So where do you guys think?

I mean, I guess this is both a backward question and a forward question. Like, I mean, so Clancy loved Reagan. Reagan was the war on drugs. Clancy seems to think the drugs. are terrible and evil, and that the war on drugs is a lose-lose proposition. Like, it's a weird set of, like, things happening there. And I think conservatives generally have had that exact same problem, right? That does not compute loop for, like, 40 years.

Is it, am I right? Am I wrong? I think that's about right. Can I ask one question about the book? Because I don't know. I don't know. Again, I haven't read the book. in how does how does the book deal with how does cortez die in the book yeah in the book

cortez is sent back to cuba oh interesting where fidel who he has portrayed throughout the whole time as like you know his great friend this is the one of the funny bits is that he's always saying to um to eskabar eskabedo he's always telling him stories of well you know when i would be with fidel and i would say but because the drug dealers all just think like, well, I mean, if I got Castro's guy here, like, I'm rolling in high cotton. But then it turns out that actually he was kind of drummed out of Cuba, and when he's sent back to the death sentence, because Castro hates him and thinks he's a traitor. So there's like a darkly funny angle to it. That is interesting. So in the, in the Milius script,

what happens is Cortez comes to Washington, D.C. Cortez comes to Washington, D.C., he kills Qatar. He kills Cutter while Cutter's out on his morning run. So it's like 5.30 in the morning. It's pre-dawn. There's nobody in the streets of D.C. kills Cutter. And then junkies stab Cortez to death. Drug addicts hanging out around

the White House area attack and kill Cortez. Which again, again, this is a script written by John Millius, who is very much like Tom Clancy in that fairly reactionary right-wing artist,

mode. And his way to square the circle of the drug war was like, yes, some of these excesses are bad, but like there is also all of this social disorder. We could use it for good in this case, maybe, but like it's still, it's still out there. And it is

kind of interesting. I do think I look, I Cutter kills himself in the book. And it is a, like, it's one of these things where he is given, you know, he's told you've got 12 hours to put your affairs in order. Right. And we're going to arrest you. And what The unspoken agreement is, you know,

Frankie Five Angels, go take care of things. It's like the Godfather part too. Yeah. It was interesting to hear, there's a part in this movie where they're having a conversation about the efficacy of waging this particular war. Like, and he gives his response,

which reminded me just a little bit of like the traffic, in traffic where the kid is saying, look, man, what if everybody was coming to you all the time into your neighborhood saying, give me drugs, give me drugs, give me drugs, where they talk about, like, what do you do about the demand problem? Like, as long as Americans want drugs, somebody will give them drugs. And so we can, you can go after these guys river, but like the demand problem is there, which has always been the issue with the war on drugs. It's like, you can kill a supplier.

What you cannot do is kill the demand for the supply. So the war on drugs has really morphed, though, in America, right? Like, we had the war on drugs through the 80s into the 90s, and then we hit a moment where it kind of receded and it looked like the country was on its way to making its peace with legalization. And then fentanyl became an entire new class of touchstone, right? Like, you could just invoke fentanyl to justify anything in the kind of the same way that people talked about cocaine in the 80s, I think. And I mean, I have my own theory on this, which is that it's because fentanyl affected a lot of white people. And so all of a sudden, you could make a lot of political hay out of it. But maybe that's not right.

I don't know. But it does feel like that's back, right? I mean, that is literally behind the Venezuela, right? The pretext is, well, we're killing drug dealers. And so we all got to be really upset about drugs again. Thoughts? I don't. I'm skeptical.

I know, I know that you, that. you've written about this before that it's the it's white victims instead of black victims so we talk about it differently in terms of victims versus you know versus criminals etc but I do think the response

in both cases is kind of the same right like this is a response to cocaine this movie this movie is a response to cocaine and and crack and you saw a lot of that you saw a lot of that in the 1980s and the fentanyl response is to you know this kind of heroin substitute And the response is very similar.

It's like, well, maybe we can, maybe we can kill our way out of it. It's possible. I don't know. So the reason, so I don't remember enough about the drug situation in the 80s and what I have learned from popular culture looking back is that it wasn't so much, like the thing about fentanyl is that it just kills people unsuspectingly all the time. Like people die from fentanyl constantly.

these places, like in Ohio and other places where, you know, Illinois, a lot of these rural areas where people, you think, like, how is, when people talk about immigration or the crackdown on things crossing the border, like specifically sort of illegal crossing, and like, why does it matter to people in these, in the middle of the country? And I'm always like, oh, fentanyl, that's why they care, because it is through their, in a way where I don't think it's just white people versus non-white people. I think that the difference between like the party drugs of the 80s in Miami and what versus like a bunch of people who things are getting either cut with fentanyl and so they're overdose and dying. Like people

aren't trying to die and they're dying at this alarming rate because of accidental ODs. I mean like if you drive around Pennsylvania like I do, you're driving like long ways in the turnpike, there'll be these signs that talk about like, are you carrying Narcan? Carry Narcan. You could save a life. Like it's so, it happens so often in these communities that like a PSA is about you, regular person, carrying this on your body because you could encounter it at any moment and save someone's life by being able to like Narcan them, which feels different than a bunch of people choosing to, like, party pretty hard in, yeah, Miami. So let me cut against my own thing here.

So the cocaine thing became, like, it was a party drug, but crack, the crack version became a real epidemic, and it was centered on inner cities. It was, it was predominantly in African-American communities. I will say another difference, though, with this is that the open. Opioid drugs are more powerfully addictive than cocaine and crack. Crack highly addictive, but not as addictive as the opioid class of drugs. More instantly addictive, get addicted much faster. But then the real thing is that the opioid crisis is born out of prescription drug abuse,

which was aided and abetted by the system itself, by pharmaceutical companies and unscrupulous doctors. And so that is an element to it, which makes it different. I should be clear, my argument isn't like, oh, America ought to treat people who have fentanyl addictions the way America treated black communities during the crack epidemic when it was like looked down and the idea was like, what's your problem? Just say no, right? I think that the enlightened view that we have towards people with substance abuse problems where the idea is that we should be treating them. To the extent possible, I would just like to see that equally applied, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, totally. The issue with fentanyl, as, as Sarah says, is that, like, I think people are dying accidentally and not through repeated, you know, I, I don't know.

I hear about it in neighborhoods in Dallas, too. Like, somebody's like, I got to go to a funeral, 17-year-old, like, OD on fentanyl, didn't know, didn't know he was doing it. And, like, it's, uh, it's not, it's not great. Um, yeah. Anyway, downer. Well, so what is the, I mean, and then there's the authoritarian angle of this, right? So Rodrigo Duterte in, in the Philippines, came to power basically on the backs of an anti-drug platform. And he instituted a hybrid authoritarian regime full of thousands of extrajudicial killings, purely based around the idea of we've got

get the drugs. I don't know. I feel like I hear a lot about that these days, right? I mean, am I making too much of it? No. No, I mean, but Sarah, maybe you, you probably, you hear more about this, I'm sure, talking to, talking to voters. I get the sense that the, the immigration crackdown has very little to do with drugs and everything to do with jobs, right? I mean, that, like, jobs in, like, oh, they're all bringing in drugs. Isn't that, like, the cover being given for it? Well, so here, what I have always, thought about immigration and why it has become such a potent issue is that it touches a bunch of different vectors. It touches crime. It touches drug deaths. It touches jobs in the

economy. And then it touches like people's general sense of our country looks like culture stuff, right? Like why are we speaking Spanish? Why does why does my phone give me a Spanish option? Right. So, and I think that Trump has been able to weaponize it effectively because it cuts across these vectors like if you stop this one thing you have a positive in his telling right you have a positive impact on drugs on crime um on the culture uh and on jobs and so uh i just i just think that's why that's why it's so i don't think it's one or the other but i think that one of the it's to me it is always drugs tends to be the answer that i have when people are like are there so many immigrants coming to ohio like why do people care in ohio

And I'm like, because they have just the fentanyl and people, when people, when Trump says like the drugs coming over the border, like that, that they feel that in a way that I just don't think our coastal ears here because we don't see the fentanyl crisis the way people are in these other communities. Oof. It's bad. It's bad. So my takeaway from all this is that we need clear and present danger to fentanyl bugal. Is that is that? We've got to get working on that. So here's a question for you guys.

I have long been, I don't know how to say this out sounding terrible. Oh, boy. And that's what I'm doing today. Okay. But I've long, there are a class of people who I am glad did not make it to the Trump era because I wouldn't want to have seen how they confronted it. Tom Clancy is one of them. because he was Mr. Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.

Huge fan of robust American foreign policy, shining city on a hill, all of that stuff. And yet, I just worry, I'm going to say I think he would have, but I worry that he would have been confronted with Trumpism and said, yeah, I'm into that. because one of the hallmarks of his writing is that he has one of the reasons I love his writing he has tremendous sympathy even for the Russians

and so like his Russian characters are some of his best characters like Cardinal and the Kremlin he especially loves like the general staff officers and the Russian army like he just he gets inside their heads and he's able to do it

because he's this like jingoistic American but who also loves the Russian general staff and it just has deep sympathy for how they were suffering under totalitarianism. So he, like, hates the Pulp Bureau chiefs, but he loves the Russian people. The one group he really, really hates is the libs.

And it comes up over and over again, and it's always like some young Ivy League educated liberal. Right? Those are the characters he never has any sympathy for. And I just worry that, like, you know, today, maybe Clancy would have jettisoned all the Reagan stuff, too. Yeah, I mean, it's not the Reagan stuff, though. I mean, I take your point.

I don't know, and I haven't read a lot of Clancy. My only, the only thing I have to push back with is that the Jack Ryan character is he loves this guy. And he makes the villains in his stories are the ones who are morally compromising. and I just like my my like overall thing was like you know I can't remember I haven't watched enough things with just a straight up hero where we are not questioning is he the good guy or the bad guy like this is the good guy and every decision he makes every choice that he makes is with a kind of moral clarity he's making the right one and I was like and I this feeds me we need more straight up good guys in the world

I agree. I mean, look, I take your point, JBL, and I, it's something I think about with a number of authors and figures. Myself, my... You and I are running on the same wavelength here. I don't know about you, Sarah. But look, but look, you know, like, you look at a guy like Brad Thor who has always been very conservative and into the kind of same Clancy world, not quite as wonky, I would say, not as, but. he has been pretty, pretty stalwart. Like, no, this is actually bad. He's the best, man. He's a bulwark guy.

Yeah, no, Brad Thor is stuck with it. So I would like to think that Tom Clancy would take the Bradthor. I choose, I choose hope. I know. And I think it also just stick up for Clancy. For anybody who's reading this who hasn't done him, he is, don't, again, don't get fooled by the later stuff, which is co-authored after he's become an industry. But his early books, especially Cardinal in the Kremlin, which is his best, his best novel.

they are so much better than they have to be. The writing is better than it has to be. The characters are better than they have. Like, really, he was a very gifted writer. I got to, I got to get, I have to, I have to read some Clancy because I was telling, as I was telling you before the show, when there was this weird split in my, in my high school friends, it was like, there were the people who read Clancy books and there were the people who read Crichton books. And you would think that these two groups would be best friends, because the same basic. idea. Like, you know, very, very, very, it was very jets and sharks. Because you're all cool kids who, who read books. Did you, did you read like pop fiction when you were like high school

college there? Or were you just reading like philosophy and literature? No, no, no. I read lots of, I read a lot of Stephen King. But I did, I will say, I did read like a lot of the classics early. Like I was just like, I want to know what the fuss is about, um, about like the a bearable lightness of being, and I don't know, whatever whatever was the, I read like a tale of two cities and all of that stuff, that tended

to be, mainly because I wanted to understand the world of literature. But I definitely, I mean, I've read all the Stephen King books. Like, I remember taking the dome with me to Bulgaria and I'm for my beach reading and I'm just lugging that thing

around. That was one of the nice things about getting the first, like, I got a Kindle and I could carry like five Stephen King books around with me at one time. And it would not be a, it would not, you know, actually destroy my back trying to do it. Yeah. It was a nice. Any party thoughts on, uh, clear and present danger? JBL, is this your favorite of the Jack Ryan movies? No, my favorite of the movies is still a hunt for Red October. And that's probably, so I like Philip Noise as a director. But Hunt for Red October is, uh, help me, Sonny.

Is, is what? Who's the director? John McTiernan? Yeah. So Hunt for Red October is John McTiernan operating at the absolute top of his game. Yeah. And it's, I mean, everything in that movie. I would argue that Hunt for Red October is a perfect movie.

There is, there is nothing, not a frame of it can be changed. Yeah, it's interesting. That might, I watched Hunt for Red October during the pandemic for the first time, which is actually when I thought I'd watch Clear and Present Danger, but I definitely watched the other one. I would say just as a straight enjoyment matter. I enjoyed this one more than all. Really? This was my, the one I thought was the most riveting and the most, and now part of it is like political intrigue is my bag. And so the bureaucracy part of it was, I thought, really well done and fun to watch.

But this, no, this was definitely my favorite as just a pure sitting with the popcorn. How much did I like it? This is exactly how I, Sarah voiced my opinion on this exactly. Like, I will acknowledge that The Hunt for Red October is a better movie because it is John McTiernan in an all-time great run of movies. You know, he makes diehard Predator, The Hunt for Red October in a four-year period or whatever. It's just an amazing sequence of events. And then, and this is not a perfect movie. Like, we didn't really discuss the last 20 minutes at all, which I just don't care that much.

Like, it's, again, it's like this TNT thing where, like, if the last commercial break is before that last sequence in Bogatime, like, I might leave. I might not, I might not watch the end of the movie, just because I don't care. I don't care that much about it. But this is, it is still my, it is my favorite Jack Ryan movie to watch. It's the one that I will throw on. It's the one with the most discreet sequences that I enjoy watching, kind of in isolation.

And it's not just the, it's not just the SUV convoy assault. It's all of the stuff in the jungle with the military team. Like all of those little vignettes where they're just going around blowing things up, I find riveting. I found, when I, 14 year old me watching that was like, this is the highest form of cinema watching watching these guys drop bombs down into little a little spider hole drug packaging when ding chavez is trying out and he's like creeping up they're doing the red blue team that's the show where is he yeah and if it's so fantastic because i'm a sneaky bastard sir uh it's that was i watched that and i was like this is pure delight watching this yeah all that stuff is all that stuff is all that stuff is great. And we did not discuss Mr. Clark or Willem Defoe. I mean, so Mr. Clark becomes an entire spinoff franchise within the Clancy books because he is basically snake eyes from G.I. Joe.

So he is a guy from Vietnam. He's a spec ops guy from Vietnam who should be dead and who gets a new identity. And so he is a man with no name. Mr. Clark is not his real name. He lives somewhere out in the eastern shore, you know, and like a little island atoll in the Chesapeake Bay. And he's basically Tom Clancy's Batman. So I was going to just say, this is part of when I talk about like the good guys and the bad guys. Like even the mercenary here like has a heart of gold. And is like on the side of the good guys. And I just I was here for that. Yeah. Like I said, it was not always that way. A lot of his

like shadier qualities get poured into Ritter. He just he just kind of absorbs it all which is which is interesting. It's a really it's it's an interesting choice. All right. Well that was a lot of fun. Maybe do we do we want to do well we'll decide what we want to do next week off camera. We shouldn't debate that here but

Margin call. I don't know. I feel like it's all the president's men. I mean Robert Redford Oh. Sunny's right. Yeah, that's great. I want to watch a movie where a president who commits crimes gets impeached. Yeah. Let's do that. Spoiler alert, JVL.

Sci-fi fantasy. Not everybody has seen it. I wasn't alive when that happened. I don't know. All right. Another great episode of Bullwork Movie Club. Again, if you enjoyed watching it, hit like, hit subscribe. Share it with your friends.

Always send it to people. Be like, hey, this is a fun show. We need more fun things. So hopefully you guys had a good time. I know I did. And we'll talk to you next week.