Upstream - S2E7: The Sum of All Fears

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

This movie boldly asks: What if a global neo-nazi cabal used a stolen israeli nuke to glass the city of Baltimore?  What if CIA Analyst Jack Ryan (Slightly too young Ben Affleck) was to try to stop it?    Find bonus episodes at our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond   *WEB DESIGN ALERT*  Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/   Find us at https://killjamesbond.com and https://twitter.com/killjamesbond

Ha ha ha ha! Yeah, no, that's too true, mate, too true. Too true. Listen. This is a podcaster in its natural habitat. See the cans of drink arrayed around the recording studio with still a remarkably expensive Shure SM78B as the microphone. In the United Kingdom right now, bills are going through the

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can contribute to preserving this fascinating and completely useless species. You hear what Andrew Tate said the other day on his podcast when he was on with J.R.Rogan. Alice, Abby, and Nate all have other ventures that get the money, but I am a useless little fuckhead. And if I can't have your money, I will die. No, it's fucking, let me pull it up, mate, let me pull it up. It's absolutely mental, and he said this to him. Please, if I have to get a real to face off against besides the Russians all the time. Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond.

I am Alex Gordor-Kelly and joining me as always are my friends Abigail Thorne and Defna. Hey! How's it going? Hi. We're almost done with Jack Ryan, I promise. Almost there, baby. Oh my god. This is, it's getting to be a trial now. We watched The Sum of All Fears.

They recast this fucker again. Because it's a to be a trial now we watched the sum of all fears uh they recast this fucker again it's yeah it's it's a it's a reboot as much as a prequel yeah because it's a prequel but it's it's before hunt for red october but also it's 2002 yeah yeah yeah uh they cast ben affleck a quite young ben affleck young as jack as Jack Ryan an Affleck how cute is he 11 out of 10 according to this film very kind of average looking twink Ben Affleck

12 out of 10 actually is the line 12 12 I'm sorry unbelievable we don't start with twink Affleck

we start in Israel oh yeah because uh oh I'm gonna get more weird messages on Reddit you may be familiar with with in Israel. Uh-oh, I'm going to get more weird messages on Reddit.

You may be familiar with the Yom Kippur War, where in 1973 Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, which led to its current borders when they won that war. I got no strong opinions. Depending on when you're listening to this

podcast, of course and a helpful sort of like intertitle tells us that uh at the beginning of the war it seemed as if israel's ground forces were going to be overrun and because they were risking being overrun and the existence of the state was threatened israel put up an f4 uh fighter bomber jet we're armed with one nuclear bomb and already already less than a minute in we get to some historical revisionism because this is not true israel in order to uh force nixon's hand into something called operation nickel grass which uh resupplied all their losses and turned the war around for them, very sort of noisily armed 13 nuclear warheads,

including Jericho intermediate range ballistic missiles targeted at Damascus and Cairo. Wow. Sounds less heroic when you put it like that. Yeah. Also, we see this jet go up with one nuclear bomb and the soundtrack, it tells us that we're meant to feel that this is noble to potentially end all life on Earth.

And also the pilot is distracted because he's looking at a picture of his family so that we sympathize with the man who was prepared to fire a nuclear missile. He was flying a nuke toward like, not even Palestine, he was flying a nuke towards like not even not even palestine he was flying a nuke towards like syria or egypt and yeah cairo yeah it was it was the galan heights of syria yeah yeah oh fuck yeah it would be towards syria but we're we're very early into this movie and it's already done better than israel ever has by admitting that they have nukes which is something that israel has never formally admitted. Yes. One of the many things, actually. Yeah.

But because he's looking at a picture of his family, like a sentimental little bitch, he gets owned. Eh, bitch made. Syrian air defence just shoot him down with a surface-to-air missile. The plane comes down, the bomb comes down with it uh and as we well know nuclear weapons are in general designed to survive a plane crash there's still one in a field and one of the carolinas that a b-52 dropped there by accident yeah yeah yeah it's like fenced off now why haven't they dug it out just by offense how strong's the fence what are we talking here chain link pretty weak it's

yeah it literally is just a chain link fence and a sign that says do not enter nuclear weapon It literally is just a chain link fence and a sign that says do not enter nuclear weapon. Why haven't they removed it? I don't know. There's a couple that have ended up in the ocean off the Canaries. There are a couple in Iceland. The US Air Force has sort of dumped

loose nuclear weapons across a few places. Okay, we're back in a few days. We can do this. We can. Sending an email to the gender identity clinic unless my demands are met 10 000 estrogen pills unmarked in a coast but i've dropped off the coast of burma um but but so we we we know that the bomb is still there the plane is still there and it's it's going to be forgotten about it's going to be you know

covered by the literal sands of time right executive producer tom clancy says the credits yes promise me to us did he disavow this one he did yes this is this is a particular he really hates this cinematic history he recorded a dvd commentary track with the director really and i didn't pull any drops from this because i couldn't find it but i've seen transcripts of it and in large part it is him sort of bullying the director for various decisions that you need to do in order to adapt this fucking 800 page doorstopper into a film and just going yeah it's bullshit that wouldn't happen it's so good i love tom clancy he's possibly the biggest piece of shit in the world uh he's dead yes yes he is disavowed his own funeral yeah if you fail tom clancy will disavow

all knowledge of your activities and if you succeed so so we go to present day, 2002, Virginia, where the president and his entourage are being hurried to an underground command bunker at Mount Weather, where they are sort of confronted with the Russians having launched nuclear weapons, and we can kind of tell already, even before they admit it, that this is an exercise. I was fooled. Really? Yeah. Yeah, me too.

I'm not happy with tell gone because they're all very like practiced and unhurried and polished he pulls out the little like um uh card with the launch codes on it he's like yeah my thing's second from the top go ahead and like launch on my order well i thought this was i thought this was you know as you would imagine it to be in a movie and i like what they did with it later, too. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, it's good. We see the president order a retaliatory nuclear strike on Russia, which has launched nuclear weapons against the US.

But we do that basically in order to, A, show you what the process is like, and B, show that the president is tough and decisive. This scene is absolutely chocked full of guys we like to see. So the president of the United States is James Cromwell, and my God, the US would be a better place if that were true. Morgan Freeman is there as director of the CIA. Director of the, yes, yeah. And also Philip Baker Hall is back. He's now defense secretary.

In the previous film, he was attorney general, but he's still around, I guess, in this administration. Love to see him. And we go through the whole process of him ordering the strike, which is an Air Force guy opens the briefcase, the nuclear football, and sort of says, as part of the thing, an ID check must be performed.

And under the two-man rule, a second ID check has to be performed and two guys have to read off the things on their ID cards and commit to the strike. Have to commit to this program That's right. Yes, yeah The ID card thing, I don't know, he could just be making that up. It could just be

an elaborate prank by the Department of Defense He could say anything. He's got the football, who's going to argue? Yeah, exactly I'd use a fingerprint scanner, you know in in order to conduct the strike a penis inspection must be performed can't be faked yeah second penis inspection also has to be performed mr president let's see that hog whip it out big man yes they use this they use this like call sign for it as well. Yeah. But so as the president gets his dick out, he's interrupted by a phone call from his

wife. Says, why are you getting your dick out? Yeah, about some, like, wifely bullshit, and he's like, ah, I gotta go, cause of my bitch wife, I can't do nuclear war today. I can't play war games. Gentlemen, women be shopping. That's games shopping that's true that's true um and and so they put the fucking like being interrupted by the wife full caps it's just very funny to me it's like ah yes wife yet again hate wife so much yeah and we see him and like

last lady him and morgan freeman uh director billot, walk out of the bunker, and it's kind of a joke to them, Cabot's like, we gotta stop using just the Russians for this, which, hope you like the last hour of this movie, dude. And he goes, well, listen, I'm not that worried about Russia, I'm worried about the guy who has one nuclear weapon, not the guy who has thousands and thousands. Yeah, me. Yeah. Also, the president pronounces it...

Nuclear. Yeah, very funny. To be fair, there have been presidents who have done that. That's true. That's true. This president, President Fowler, he's sort of like Clinton, I guess. There's literally a Clinton joke in this movie as well.

He seems like a muscular liberalism guy. He like he was in vietnam wasn't he yes yeah he says he was a marine officer in vietnam um so he also sends morgan freeman to to russia to go see what the vibe is to check the vibes of of their guys yeah well i mean specifically morgan freeman we hear is going to go to russia to to help oversee their decommissioning efforts they're like as like as i think russia and the u.s have been for a few years they've been like engaging and gradually decommissioning their nuclear arsenals and like helping each other start treaties and salt one and salt two sure um yeah we also see that the russian president uh it's sort of like a thinly veiled Yeltsin, right? He drinks too much, he's very unhealthy. And we cut to the CIA, and the CIA office where a young Jack Ryan works.

They really are CIA clowns in this, because it's kind of like the fun locker room CIA. Like, they have banter. They're like, oh, he's gaining weight because his suit doesn't fit so good, and they're speculating about which of his staffers are like having sex with each other and their boss who is the only woman in the room sort of wanders through and goes yeah find out who's

fucking who this is good information also I'm pregnant cause you know what women are like women be like this it's not just that women be like this, it's like this that, you know, you as a man can have fun in the office and then your boss, if she's a woman, is your mum.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And then also, like, is it good intelligence? Like, yeah, I guess it's worth looking at whether or not Yeltsin is gaining weight, but they're not looking at it,

they're just, like, flexing on him. They're just going like, oh, he looks like a fat piece of shit right now. Yeah, they're just owning Yeltsin is gaining weight, but they're not looking at it. They're just, like, flexing on him. They're just going like, oh, he looks like a fat piece of shit right now. Yeah, they're just owning Yeltsin in his comments section, which is totally uncalled for. Yeah, it's like Enemy of the State. There's just a bunch of guys watching it and, like, riff-tracking it.

Yeah, and it makes you wonder, as with Enemy of the State, did the CIA not have anything else to do in the sort of late 90s, early 1000s? Can't think of anything now. You see all of their desks, like like covered with like um the files and stuff it's like one of those says bin laden determined to strike inside united states and they're just like ah look at this fucking piece of shit um then we see we see two things um one is that the nuclear weapon is found

in the desert by two dudes um one of whom looks strikingly like Barry Chuckle which is very funny. Two dudes who look like Bedouin which they aren't in the Galan Heights. Imagine if Barry Chuckle was part of the Bedouin.

Yeah, and the first thing this movie wants you to know about Arabs is that they're stupid yes so they to me to you and they drop the nuclear weapon and it doesn't go on yeah and and then and sort of a a hatch on it opens and one of them like sticks his arm in there just like hey it feels fucking warm in here uh probably not gonna worry about that that's not gonna come back to bite me in like an hour of movie that's fine fine. I think, I think that's fine. Probably. Yeah.

And they also want to sell it. Yes. Yeah. For scrap. Uh, the, the second thing that happens, we see a guy. Oh,

we see a fucking guy. So, so we see a very nice, well-mannered sort of like goateed European man. Uh, looks a bit like sort of like Hans Gruber has aged about 20 years and put on some Hans Gruber got in the machine from the fly with Eddie Izzard

former pre-transition Eddie Izzard and he's giving a lecture about US foreign policy and Russian foreign policy in Chechnya he has one of what are a number of baffling lines in this movie where he says that Chechnya is like a beautiful virgin and is also part of Europe and that Europe should have an independent destiny and rather than like

being caught in between the US and and Russia and what happens is when he starts talking about Europe having independence and Europe being sort of like a power in its own right sinister music starts like this is so funny we pan around the podium around the lectern that he's lecturing from and we see that he's taken off his watch he's left his watch on the thing and on the back of the watch is a fucking engraved swastika so good and when happened, I had to pause the movie for about 15 minutes, just to sort of like put my head in my hands, really reflect on this, and then go find all of the bits in the OSS movies where the Nazis just put swastikas in places and post them in the group chat. Not since we did Lupin the Third have we run into a Nazi quite so surprisingly.

Yeah, an unexpected Nazi. You're talking about Adolf Hitler. I think it's not great for us, just sort of psychologically, but every time we see a Nazi in one of these movies, we sort of start cheering. Like, they're doing the Nazi thing again! When I saw Hitler, I stood up and clapped.

Stood up and clapped. I have seen actual real-life Nazis talk, use this dog whistle of Europe must have our own destiny and Europe needs to be strong and stuff. So it's not that bad. We'll talk a little bit later on, I think, about the portrayal of Nazis in this film when they get to their secret spectre meeting.

It's just the flash. Yes. Oh my God, I can't wait. We actually got this the wrong way around what we haven't what happens is we get the nazis first and then we get the arabs are stupid scene so what we do is we go directly from hitler 2 to uh like desert arabs and how stupid this movie thinks they are it's like oh no yeah yeah they just said that's a new hit his name is literally dressler that's yeah they just they just said i was hitler too oh just hitler too distraught yeah so we also have to see

that jack ryan because he's young in this one he's not married to his wife kathy yet and so we have to see that jack ryan fucks Yeah, Jack Ryan fucks. Jack Ryan fucks. Jack Ryan fucks Bridget Monaghan, which, damn. Yeah. Hello. The fact that they try to have some sort of relationship drama midway through this, but there's absolutely no way to sell it because you know these two get married. Yeah.

Also, this gets to another beef I have with with this which is that ben affleck is too young he's an okay actor now but he wasn't then he's not a good enough actor yet he's definitely like aged into his casting i think 100 yeah yeah for sure and so like you can do that she confronts him with the thing about like oh you actually love me and we're gonna get married and he's like acting do you remember this do you remember that bit in the rock where the girlfriend is like you wanna get married to me i just i feel like that's the only story that movies from this era can tell us like oh my girlfriend like wants to be really serious but i'm just a guy oh geez i gotta save the world yeah that's yeah yeah so we get a quick yeltsin joke which is yeltsin is at the kremlin he's like

i don't know what everyone's complaining about i am very healthy and then instantly drops down dead of too much vodka this one's genuinely like really funny they grade it like it's a fucking like black and white show and it's shot like one as well so when he dies he's like at the bottom of a staircase and the shot is him at the bottom of the staircase the staircase up and then the person he's talking to like on the next level and it's at a slightly dutch angle it's like it's just it's a perfect pastiche of that kind of shot um and as mr color grading i just be like ah colors yeah i'll do this again later him dying uh precipitates ryan being called into work on an emergency he hasn't told his girlfriend that he works for the

cia he's told her that he's a historian i haven't told my girlfriend i work for the cia either yeah largely because i don't have one oh single to facilitate a parasol relationship. We're all single. We love you, the audience, the most of all. You specifically. Yeah, the person listening to this. So she's like,

why the fuck do you have a pager? Where are you going? What kind of work emergency does a historian have? But he's out the door. He's out the door, and he's experiencing a sort of religious experience I like to call the analyst's joy. Which is going out in a weird one, taking a slightly sort of off-kilter prediction, and being fucking right. Ryan has written this paper, which apparently no one has read about the succession

to the russian presidency if yeltsin goes and he has picked out his guy a guy called nemerov and no one believes him no one reads him no one cares but he's fucking right look at every single analyst like spends their entire life dreaming about this happening no matter what yes yes yeah um and as a result as a reward he gets to hang out with replacement uh james l jones yeah prequel james l jones morgan freeman yes yeah they literally just got a different sort of like older black statesman actor and i was just like yeah do the same role i didn't realize that these weren't the same characters until Morgan Freeman died later on. And then I was like, oh, okay, I guess he's not James Earl Johnson. Yeah, quite genuinely, I thought it was like

a try to be the same character thing. Didn't I even for a second consider. The next, I would say, half an hour of this movie is essentially Morgan Freeman delivering lines like You're about to breathe air that's way over your pay grade, so listen up. What the fuck does that mean? To Jack Ryan. It means I have to steal a guy's shirt and tie and suit jacket

and put them on you. I have to dress you because you're a child. I liked it when Harrison Ford Jack Ryan was kind of a bit of a geek, and I don't believe that Ben Affleck is a geek. He's a different kind of inattentive. He's like, oh, I'm just too cool and afraid of commitment to have a tie

and a jacket, whereas Harrison Ford was just like, oh, I don't know what tie to wear. It's different vibes. I liked Harrison Ford, but he felt more put upon. Yeah, I think this is just what's been happening to protagonists throughout the last couple of decades. There's a similar vibe with age, too.

I don't really like, and I'll see if I still feel this when we do the sort of new, new one, but I don't really like a young Jack Ryan. I like him being young for the room. I like him being the only guy who's still in his 30s or 40s in a room full of 60-year-olds. That's good for the character to me. But like.

But slightly too old to be doing the action man shit. Yes. Yes. Anyway, Morgan Freeman takes him to the intelligence committee and they have like a really cool secure room where like they press a button and the glass turns frosted. That's so awesome. Yeah. Where they press a button and the glass turns frosted? That's so awesome. Yeah, I think that's... They made a Skiff a cool glass cube instead of just a room where a bored guy takes your phone off you. Movies are amazing.

That's cinema, baby. That's Kina. That's the magic of the silver screen. The chairman of the Intelligence Committee wants two things. He wants to know what Nemerooff's deal is and he also wants to deliver an incredible line he wants to get up there in front of uh in front of them and say this morning my wife woke up and said that i was old bald and ugly anyway what about russia he genuinely like he delivers that line there's just a long pause and morgan freeman's like is

was that a question yeah it's like what's happening what are you doing man he gets up and he's like release my wife um but yeah and also that's on the record now that's staying that's saying forever there's also sort of a running joke here we see the president's done it earlier we didn't mention at the time which is politicians can't get russian names right This guy calls them like Nemses of, and like they keep putting weird Zs in there that don't belong. And I feel that this reveals some politics about this movie, which is, okay, in real life, elected politicians are very stupid.

We agree with this. We know this. We've all seen Liz Truss. However, when a movie about the CIA makes the standpoint, all of these guys are idiots and they need the CIA to fucking tell them how to pronounce a relatively straightforward name, that's ideology happening. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, because the CIA are also morons, fools, jokers of the highest caliber. Yeah, jesters. Yes. Couldn't even kill Fidel Castro. God, they really couldn't, though. I had to do it for them and make it look like old age. It couldn't even stop me from stealing all these old nuclear weapons. I was the one who they sent in to kill him who just immediately got seduced.

That was me. Yeah, for sure. For sure, me too. Happens to the best of us we get to uh another one of the traits of ryan as a character that i actually really like which is he is pathologically unable to shut the fuck up in a meeting yeah i do i respect this a great deal it was good in hunt for red october it's good here too because the chair of the intelligent committee is like yo nemorov sounds like a bad guy he's probably gonna fuck shit up in chechnya and ryan is like whispering in morgan freeman's ear like, yo, Nemirov sounds like a bad guy. He's probably going to fuck shit up in Chechnya.

And Ryan is like whispering in Morgan Freeman's ear like, yo, Nemirov actually rules. I wrote a paper on him. He's sick. He's nice. Don't worry about it. I met him at a party once. Surprisingly funny. Yeah.

And Morgan Freeman's like, shut the fuck up, dude. Pick hard, dude. Yeah. He like leans back and he's like whispering, you know, when I said I wanted your advice, I didn't mean you had to actually speak. And it's just like, you can feel the embarrassment coming off of that, it's really good. Yeah. Also, two things, Morgan Freeman then, in quick, in immediate succession in fact,

flirts with two dudes. He flirts with the senator, because he goes, I don't care about what your wife said, I don't think you're ugly. Looking kinda nice with it, actually. And then... Looking good, King. Yeah, and then he takes Ben Affleck outside and he's like, sorry, fuck your girlfriend with that dick, essentially. And Affleck is like, Ryan is surprised that he knows who his girlfriend is,

forgetting that he works for the CIA. Yeah, not 100%. that he knows who his girlfriend is forgetting that he works for the CIA yeah you would have had to have filled out a form to be like hey can I have sex with this woman please yeah cause of the god damn woke college students these days am I right an informed consent

form yes we actually make our employees sign that form also. I hear it occasionally. That's right. We don't have employees. Me. The three of us is what I mean. And our employees. There's a line earlier

on where someone mentions that Jack Ryan is a CIA analyst because he was in the Marines and hurt his back. And first of all, hell yeah, man, absolutely. Sometimes you just hurt your back. But also, how fucking old were you when you were in the Marines? This dude is like 12 in this movie.

He's actually Robin from Batman and Robin. I think that you have to compress this timeline more and more so that I read this somewhere, I have no idea if it's true, I'm excited if I'm borne out by this at all but in the new ones uh he like got injured he didn't even like make it out of the naval academy before he like hurt his back um and you know what once again hell yeah yeah i fully understand sometimes you just turn your back and you're like sometimes

sometimes you get up wrong you know you just you're sitting in a chair and you get up a bit too quickly now you can't be in the marines anymore sometimes you wake up in the morning and you turn your head a little too fast and you're like oh my neck i'm gonna have to stay completely emotionless for 48 hours yeah i'm gonna have to not be in the marines anymore um at this point we get a scene that is literally just a rom-com it's it's sort of men are from mars women are from venus where morgan freeman is like so you know what's your girlfriend like um and he goes oh i'm so in love with her but she's so afraid of commitment cut to her working at the hospital where she's like he's so afraid of commitment and i don't know what he does for a living because he keeps he works in

washington dc uh he keeps getting paged at weird hours of the morning he says he's a historian but that's clearly not true i wonder what he does whenever he gets paged it like coincides with major world news events this woman's got a this was a doctor just put it together yeah she's she's a very busy woman she's too busy to make dedu just put it together yeah she's she's a very busy woman she's too busy to make deductions of this kind i i think it's something that no one really understands without having like been there or lived there or you know known people who have how much dc is like a small company town and if you work for the cia everyone fucking knows that it's just everyone's like yeah sure historian okay um it's um stupid

anyway so we have we have that sort of romance set up and now we have to learn some more about arabs yes so we already learned that arabs are stupid now we have to learn that arabs are easily cheated because they're stupid yes that's. A mysterious white guy named Olsen is inspecting the bomb. He's Jörg Van der Kloek. He's a white South African guy. He fully is Jörg Van der Kloek. There's a line later on where

Ryan goes, What's a South African doing in the Ukraine? He's doing a little job. Cancelled! Cancelled for saying the Ukraine. Yeah, that's true. Zelensky's going to be really, really upset about that after he's done banning people from unionising.

Yeah, and taking fire shoots in Vogue. So he buys the nuke off of them, but he cheats them. He's like, oh, this is worthless junk, but because your son was killed in the war, I'll give you $400 for it. And then he sells it to the Nazis for $50 million and it's quite funny because as he's doing this

he's watching Antiques Roadshow. Which I thought was quite quirky. It's so funny to be a black market guy just watching Antiques Roadshow in your hotel room. Incidentally, the Antiques Roadshow that he's watching goes... I found her in the attic of an old mansion house in an old part of Glasgow.

So, you know, Glasgow. That's very funny to have Antiques Roadshow happening under sinister music. Yes. This is the other thing I love about Olsen, is that Olsen is so happy in his work. Yeah. Every single scene, he's like smiling, he's humming a little aria to himself,

he's having a nice time. He does happy. He's got a beautiful apartment in damascus he's he's really he's thriving um being an international weapons smuggler he probably retired off the ship 50 million in 2002 was like a shit ton of money yeah yeah for sure as opposed to now where it's you know nothing you could probably pay your energy bills for a few weeks on that. Maybe you could buy half a flat. So, Ryan has been dragged to Russia to go to this meeting, the CIA

inspection. There's a funny scene on the plane where he's calling his girlfriend like, no, honestly, honey, I had an emergency as a historian. And Morgan Freeman's like, just tell him you work for the CIA. And he's like, well, gosh, honey, I work for the CIA and I've got to go to Russia to decommission nuclear weapons. And she hangs up and Morgan Freeman's like, ah, you fucking

dipshit. Yeah, this is deeply funny. I really enjoyed that. I love interfering in the private lives of my employees. Yeah. So, they meet the new president who is Kieran Hines. A guy that we love to see. We love to see.

We should start keeping count of the guys that we love to see because this movie has start keeping count of the guys that we love to see, because this movie has a decent number of them. For, like, exactly 0.1 of a second when he turned around the first time, I thought it was Alan Rickman, and I was about to go apeshit. But this is a phenomenal consolation prize to me. Yeah, true.

So, the thing about Kieran Hines is that he does most of his lines in Russian, because Russian is worse than mine. It's atrocious. I was convinced fully like russian guy of it but he tries he tries like intimidating ryan a little bit or fucking with him a little bit by being like uh your thing was wrong because i don't actually fuck that much also i'm gonna go through an interpreter for this whole conversation and ryan calls his bluff because he knows he speaks english and this initiates a sort of like mob movie like thing of a i like this guy kind of a lot of

slapping on the back hey oh i'm friends with the russian president over here um and then he has i do think it's nice that the jack ryan series has now learned how to cast irish actors um it's just yes and making them play Russians. Couldn't have used them for anything else, but, you know, it's fine. They weren't available. All of them were off on holiday when they were trying to make Patriot Games.

It's a shame. So then President Nemirov has a very frank conversation with Morgan Freeman, where Morgan Freeman's like, yo, what's the deal with Chechnya? And Nemirov's like, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's fine.

He says that Chechnya is, quote, a nation of criminals. Andirov's like, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's fine. He says that Chechnya is, quote, a nation of criminals. And Morgan Freeman's like, okay, sick, cool. I think this is just deeply funny to imagine reversed, right? Like a new president gets elected and the head of the SVR comes by with a bunch of guys and is like, what are you thinking about doing with Louisiana? Tell me now. What is the deal with Puerto Rico? Explain to me now, please.

It's just interesting. rico explain to me now please like it's just interesting explain hawaii to me um but so yeah um the vibe here is interesting because we know that ryan's contention is that nemoroff is basically a good guy um yeah and he's not a hardliner and in fact he is trying to like navigate between the hardliners in the military who might just like coup him otherwise um and that the vibe here is very much like inside this russian there is an american trying to get out uh yes that's something that tom clancy loved doing i think that's maybe one of the only aspects of this movie he wouldn't have disavowed. He did that with Captain Ramius as well in Hunt for Red October. Yes, yeah, very much. Because he wasn't Russian, he was Lithuanian.

Occasionally you need a guy to be able to reach across the aisle by going, I realise that you also want to be American. And I do. I realise that you fucked in college, but only for the first two years um we're now buds we're mates so so they they also see his weird shadow guy a guy called grushkov

who we're told is an old kgb guy another guy we love to see because it's michael byrne love him ah okay love this actor another veteran of the sharp series which we'll have to get to at some stage um and and he's sort of like he's mostly around to sort of be knowing and kind of like monk like yeah so they go to the nuclear decommissioning facility and ryan's like hey there's three guys on your staff list you aren't here and michael byrne's like don't worry about it they are all out to lunch now yes all out to lunch at same place i've gone to greg's they are all getting pizza vegan sausage roll morgan freeman's like you know these three guys are the exact guys you would need to build a bomb and they're all missing the russians don't know where they are

yeah so here's here's my major point of contention with that. Why is it of note that three of the scientists working in the Russian nuclear weapons decommissioning facility have specialisms related to nuclear weapons? I think they all do. They all should, yeah, yeah. These are the guys that need to build a bomb. Everyone else is just fucking jerking each other off. The other 14 guys, fully extraneous.

Yeah, they actually all work in the catering department yeah the the other the other thing i like about this is uh morgan freeman uh his character he has a moment where he steps in the front door of this nuclear weapons thing he's like uh sort of long time veteran cold warrior being like you know i sent three guys to their deaths trying to infiltrate this place and and I just walked in the front door. It's a nice moment. I really like that. It's a nice sort of ties of history thing. Another nice moment is one of the scientists is wearing a shirt

that they get him to translate, and it's just like this guy's wearing a shirt to work that says, I am a nuclear scientist if you see me running, try to catch up. And it's another one of those classic, like, humanising things that they love to do for the russians yeah that moment with morgan freeman kind of ties into the theme of the film which is

like old old fears from the past in particular kind of fears that are encoded into military technology will will come back to haunt you it's it's quite nice um yeah yeah fully um so we see a very happy bomb smuggling guy put the bomb in a crate, shipping it out of Haifa in Israel, and then we come back to the United States, and we meet, I think my favourite casting yet, sort of very noir detective John Clarke, played by Liev Schreiber. He's like, he's standing there in the rain without an umbrella waiting for Morgan Freeman. That's good. Just being sort of very grumpy, like, Morgan Freeman's like, well how's your Russian?

He's like, still works. Yeah. It's cool actually. It's really... it's good! I think he's like, he does some of the best acting in this movie. But he's like, okay, go to Russia, find out where these guys are. Also, I need your tickets to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And it's very funny to imagine this kind of John Clark, this kind of, like, very sort of dour guy being excited to go and see, I don't know, Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. This is the guy that Willem Dafoe was playing right yeah yeah for sure so instead ryan gets

together with his girlfriend who presumably now believes that he's cia because yeah yeah because morgan freeman is like wingmanning him now he's like okay you gotta make up with your girlfriend by taking her to the the hottest uh event, the White House Correspondents Dinner. You've got to take her to a swimming pool, Jack Ryan, so that you can see her without makeup. Females are always trying to trick us, man. It's called peacocking, Ryan.

There's a fascinating individual called Andrew Tate. Have you heard of him? What happens? You're drinking still water. The White House what happens you're drinking still water i the press the white house press correspondence dinner is the weirdest fucking event in the world as far as i'm concerned you get all of these dudes together and then the president of the united states does amateur stand up for an hour yeah and everyone has to be like that right well done mr president and they they show us a clip of it happening, and it's just as like, Jesus Christ, as you'd imagine.

Although I do get the drop. Smoke barrel one. Nice. And pussy tux. But so, this is mostly in, so we get the shot of someone comes up to tell the president something very important, and everybody's pages go off. I love that shot.

I love that trope, actually. It's really fun. I love it when movies do that. So more gender happens because all of the men in their tuxedos get up and run. And all of the women are just left behind. There is a lot of gender in this film. To talk girl stuff. Yeah, the women immediately shout,

Girls night! Which is nice, though. I think that was good. For sure. Yeah, it's fucking weird, man. I don't know, I really didn't like this movie, I think. No, but we gotta have some more situation room, and so what happens is

the Russians have deployed, earlier than this was publicly much talked about, Novichok nerve agents in Grozny, and just used chemical weapons and killed a shitload of people. This leads to some insane ideas for how America could or should respond to this, which culminates in recognize, like, begin provisional diplomatic representation of Chechnya, and then deploy NATO peacekeepers to Chechnya and then deploy NATO peacekeepers

to Chechnya, the same country that the Russian military is fighting a war in, through Turkey and Armenia. Abso-fucking-lutely insane. Abso-fucking-lutely insane. One of them, one of the advisors asks a question about this, like,

do you think Armenia's gonna go for this? And someone goes, yeah, probably. It'll over the russians they'll do it and knowing that this was like the same amount of forethought that went into like nato involvement in the balkans as well just oh my god it's vibes it's vibes anyway and the president's like well okay we got to respond to the russians hardcore big style Nemirov's clearly gone too far. I would feel like a real dipshit if I was a Nemirov apologist.

And Jack Ryan stands up and he's like, yo, based on vibes, I believe that Nemirov is not behind this, but actually this is some rogue generals. You don't really know this is really Nemirov. And then Nemirov immediately gets on the news and is like, what's up, it's your boy Nemirov, I did it. What's up, it's your boy Nemirov, I did it. What's up, Nemirov, it's your boy.

He stakes his reputation on it again. He's like, he's not Russian, he's Lithuanian. Immediately, like two minutes later, Nemirov appears on the news and is like, hey, I definitely did this. I ordered chemical weapons in Chechnya. I did it. Yeah, you get like such a classic shit of him. Be like, nice one, dickhead.

Like you even get someone like in the background him and be like, nice one, dickhead. Like, you even get someone like in the background just be like, nice work, man. Just like, yeah, all right, all right.

And then obviously to allay the audience, we immediately cut to Nemerov speaking to his boy and be like, it's just better if I just take, if I just say I did it, you know. He has a good line here, which is,

it's better to appear guilty than impotent, which explains a lot of foreign policy more generally, I feel. On the other hand, this is also the ultimate expression of the 90s fantasy of Russians are just Americans trying to get out from the inside. There's also a very, very interesting moment where one of the advisors, I think, says to the president, well, the Russians are doing the classic thing the Russians always do do which is do something outrageous and dare the world to stop you and I was like interesting you're not wrong but you

shouldn't be the one pointing it out much like the thing about elected officials being stupid anyway now we've got to have possibly one of my favourite genres of scenes this is the best scene in the fucking movie, hands down. That's true.

Because it comes from a different movie. This is from fucking Spectre. I greeted this scene like if you had like a fucking electrocardiogram or something, you could see the exact same bodily responses as like seeing my dog after a long period of absence. I'm just like, oh. Pupils dilate when looking at something you love. It's my boys. I never thought I'd miss James Bond.

Right? Once I recognised this scene for what it was, yeah, immediately. So we're meeting, we're in Hitler II's conference room. That's right. With his boys, Goebbels II, Himmler II, Bormann II and so forth. And also the token, like, big guy, the mongo. I've got a mongo! I've got a mongo! He's guy the mongo he's got like i've got a mongo he's got a henchman this is the best day of my fucking life dude mongo mongo's here we got a

mongo everybody called haft another just one word perfect so so hitler 2 goes is the bomb in place someone else goes yes and a third guy coughs and shuffles his feet a bit and i immediately go ah it's the we've got to kill this guy right now yes yes this guy is getting dropped into a fucking shark tank can i opt out of the of the doomsday plan please oh yes absolutely just go ahead and like go please touch your hand to this metal exit plate. It's a metal plate and all. Will you help the gentleman with his coat? It's literally the fucking scene where like, they drop that guy out of the blimp in view to a kill.

It's a perfect scene. All the boys are together. They're like, we're all agreed we're going to do evil, right? And one guy goes, oh, maybe we shouldn't do the evil. And you can see it cuts from person to person one close-up shot each of them fully all going this motherfucker's dead as hell it's so good it's so good extra bonus thing the guy who wants out is french he's the only french guy in this movie he's like um this time to how you say uh surrender and and all the german

guys go like right as a french man i am uneasy about working with the nazis yeah i'm uneasy about working at all um also it is very interesting that this film is like okay nazis in the 21st century are a problem and yes correct they are it's interesting that they are like okay nazis in the 21st century are an international group of secretive men in suits. They do kind of name check and mention a sort of fascist street movement, but it's mainly kind of like a conspiracy of elites, really, which I thought was interesting. In some ways, kind of pressing it in some ways off the mark i want to highlight that exact thing right because when this movie came out in 2002 um the neo-nazis were sort of replaced in the actual book it was arab terrorists of various flavors but in arab terrorists and one native

american man yes fascinating tom clancy is insanely racist but like roger ebert awarded this film 3.5 out of four stars he said specifically he was like the use of neo-nazis is just like bullshit man there's no new there's no there's no fucking nazis anymore idiot loser like he fully his one major criticism was using neo-nazis and we're like no they're back in fairness there, there's a lot of dumbasses involved because the director made the decision to switch it from Palestinian terrorists to neo-Nazis. And the reason why he did this is because he didn't think that Islamist terrorists could conduct an attack inside the United States.

Released in 2002, but they were, yeah. So as you know, it's developed before. Wow, I mean, that's so weird um crazy that's really a bizarre series of coincidences because something that i found quite interesting is later on skipping ahead a little bit because it's not that not that bad is hitler 2 does a live stream when he talks about how like oh hitler 1 sucked ass like hitler was a fool he didn't have the technology available at the time he didn't have mass communication he didn't take advantage of like mass media that the way that we do now and i was like fuck like this film is kind of weirdly prescient about about modern fascism in a weird

way in some ways but so so we go to the port of baltimore where there's a big room full of chains the big chain room uh and one weird-looking guy walks in. Send word to our undercover guy, the most suspicious man of all time. Yeah, he looks like an immediately forthcoming workplace shooter. But the other thing is, a guy tries to make friends with him, and the guy who tries to make friends with him is black. And I don't know any black man in america who would see a skinny white guy with creepy tattoos that he doesn't want to talk about the tattoos or show you the tattoos

and go best friends time that's my boy right there he checks in on his blokes and i hope this guy survived what happens later in this film because this guy is one of the unambiguously nice characters we see. Yeah, he really does try, but the thing about the tattoos I thought that was leading to a sort of Wayne Grow moment, a sort of American History X moment, where we would see the sleeve go up and you'd see the fucking swastika.

But we don't. Instead, what we see is that this guy receives his orders from Hitler at gmail.com, being like, it's time to do some shit. It's time for terrorism activate go john clark um finds uh that finds the missing scientists in ukraine um or the ukraine as this film calls it and uh basically gives all the evidence to morgan freeman and morgan freeman's like holy shit namarov is building a secret nuke off the books um so that he can so that he can use it and nobody's going to know

it's him, probably going to use it in Chechnya and Ben Affleck's like, no, Nemerov's my boy he's not going to do it so then they do the classic thing that they always do to Jack Wan which is like, well you better go out there and fucking investigate it so go to Russia your classic sort of rigmarole of, but I'm not a field

guy, versus you have to oh, okay then. Take this tactical palm pilot, and go hang out with John Clark. And John Clark sort of bullies him a bit. It's quite fun. He makes fun of him for thinking that he's James Bond. Yes. Yeah, that's funny.

There's a bit when they get off the boat to go infiltrate the place where they're building the bomb, and Ryan's like, I'm not going in there, and Clark just goes, yeah, of course you're not. You're staying here to make sure no one steals the boat. Yeah, his line is relaxed 007, which is quite good. John Clark also has fence melting spray, which is what I'm going to need to steal that nuclear bomb from that field.

And also, I knew that this would bug you as much as it bugged me, Alice. He finds broken glass all over the floor of the lab as he's infiltrating it and instead of ghost walking he just walks on the glass yeah just idiot fool he goes in to find all of the scientists dead being eaten by dogs and this is a problem i have with most movies the kind of dogs that you get to act they're by definition they're too nice to be frightening so you get like a stage animal to try and look aggressive and it just it looks like it's playing because it thinks it is yeah it's so it's always so deeply funny where they've got like a german chef or something and it's doing the thing where it's like baring its teeth and licking a lot and you can see in its eyes but

it's just like oh boy i'm doing it again we and they're putting the noise of like an angry dog over or something it's always so good yeah uh but so but so some ukrainian soldiers show up and john clark gets himself into a pickle he gets held at gunpoint by these two guys and ryan has to go and attempt to rescue him. But we see that Clark is, like, dangerous, because he's about to kill both these guys by himself. And it's actually kinda handled quite well, he pretends to not understand them, and to only speak English, and he's like, shining a flashlight in their eyes, and we don't actually

see that he's holding the gun until he's like it's in his hand yeah it's pretty cool um and then uh uh ryan comes up behind them and clark's like shoot these guys shoot these guys and ryan doesn't he forces them to surrender instead which it's you know a nice bit of character moment yeah for sure also like he has the magic ability to speak ukrainian because you know he's smart but he does call it the ukraine and then it's therefore cancelled he does he does because he is asking you know what's jerk vanderkloak doing in the ukraine and what jerk vanderkloak is doing in the ukraine is is just a little bit of business don't worry about it it's fitting this bomb into a we don't know this yet but into a vending machine so at this point we now get the nazi vlog uh yes we see this really like solidly

solidly put together scene although it's very funny that his um his assessment of why fascism is good is that fascism is like a virus brackets positive yeah there's a really weird bit where he's like fascism is like a virus, specifically like the AIDS virus. Fascism is gay as hell, yo. The workplace shooter looking guy creating this big vending machine and rolling it into place in Baltimore.

Yes, very odd. But also he has the same plan that fucking Blofeld had from Russia with Love. He's like, we will make the Russians in the United States destroy each other. And also this is the same plan from fucking uh you only live twice which is the nuclear weapon and then question mark fascism time yeah china time yeah it's you simply create a you know a nuclear exchange that probably makes the entire earth uninhabitable and then it's party time that's right specifically national socialist democratic

workers or german workers party time hey the d mixed up anyway uh so but we see the budweiser blimp we see the president's motorcade arriving and we see that the nazis are coming for the most america thing of all football this is yeah this is. There's just like a whole series of shots. Football. They're at a football game, baby. They've got cheerleaders. One of America's best cultural contributions. It's true. Need to invent fanboy cheerleaders, though. That's my only opinion about that.

Patented, patented, copyright, copyright pending. Meanwhile, Jack Ryan is like trying to phone a phone number. A half hour of this fucking movie, he's, like, trying to get your dad on his mobile. Literally, like, phoning him, like, mate, mate, there's a fucking nuclear weapon,

and, like, he's there, like, I'm at a football game, can't hear you, sorry, must not be important, and just, like, hangs up on him two times. Cabot's, like, there with the president. The president the president isn't he doesn't even get a box he's just like in the stands too so nobody can hear anybody um i'm sorry one of one of our listeners who is on tiktok is going to invent femboy cheerleader outfit and it's just gonna get like fucking millions of views i'd still hang up yeah that's true guarantee it exists um you think you can get fanboy cheerleaders from next live show not for any particular reason i just want that anyway um he keeps calling morgan freeman he keeps calling morgan freeman he's a martin freeman

he keeps calling morgan freeman during football again which famously doesn't have a lot of little little breaks for you to check your phone people are yelling all the time during the football is the thing about football defense things of this nature Morgan Freeman is just about able to piece together

bomb directly under your ass now Bane has destroyed the stadium it's so much fucking funnier than that because like the reveal isn't oh fuck you're right yeah he says Baltimore and he stands up in front of a

big sign that says welcome to the Baltimore because this movie thinks you are an idiot that's where the Baltimore is it's so funny he's in for Baltimore they're like there's a nuclear bomb at Baltimore And he stands up and the shot is him

In like a corner And a massive sign It's like a huge pile of old bay spice Directly in the camera So fucking good And then in response to that He realises that the attack is going to be happening At that game and

he looks around and you get like a full minute of just montage of america that is under threat it's like cheerleaders there are kids in the stand there are milfs it's gonna vaporize the femboy cheerleaders and the milfs they get the president out of there ASAP. Yeah, under the big sign that says it seems you've made another mistake by coming to Baltimore. But also, it does the thing that Air Force One does... I used to love that sign. It does the Air Force One thing again, where the Secret Service presidential detail

is two guys, and those two guys grab the president and run for the limo okay it's like why aren't they in a box but whatever um and i was like i didn't think they'd have the fucking balls i didn't think they'd do it but they fully nuke that stadium in this movie fully do it they fully goes off the way they do it i like the way they do it it's really good we cut to we cut to kathy at work she's like checking in it's normal the the tv screen is on it's got like that's fine so so the football men are upset and the screen goes white and a hundredth of a second later uh you see the bomb like the the flash reaches them blows out all the windows throws everybody across the room uh because they, like, the flash reaches them, blows out all the windows,

throws everybody across the room, because they're, like, across the city. And it's fucking devastating, like, they just, the city of Baltimore is just, like, completely fucking taken out by a nuclear bomb. And I was, like, really affected by this scene. It was, like,

quite powerfully done. I mean, I know we haven't spoken to each other in quite a long time, but I never thought it would end like this, you know? Well, so the presidential motorcade gets swept off the roads. Ryan is in a helicopter trying to call Morgan Freeman, and the helicopter just gets knocked out of the sky. It's a really well-done shot.

The whole scene is really good. They did it. They wiped Baltimore off the fucking map map and this is the point where i stopped paying attention to the movie because i started just thinking of names for like the part that used to be baltimore like the fucking you know the uh the wastes yeah the wastes the baltimore exclusion zone and things like given given that this happened about the same time that 9-11 actually happened, you'd think they'd just call it Ground Zero. They do. They do call it Ground Zero in the film. They do refer to it as Ground Zero. They said we're half a mile from Ground Zero

when the radiation team's gone. Ah, okay. There's a fucking mushroom cloud as well. Ryan scrambles out of the helicopter and sees a mushroom cloud over Baltimore and is like, fuck it. They caramelized those fucking milfs. They did it. They fucking shut off that nuke. I'm the biggest video essayist in the

world now. Unbelievable. We find out why this hasn't just vaporized everything. Because this is a problem with doing nuclear weapons as a plot threat. This is that nuclear weapons are actually too deadly. We find out that the nuclear device, in the book it

fizzles, is what it does. And so it creates an explosion that is slightly less than a Hiroshima, which is enough to only destroy the city of Baltimore. Ryan gets on the radio of the helicopter, which, bullshit, that still works. Yeah, I don't believe that. I thought the whole point of nuclear weapons was that they did an EMP that destroys toasters. I remember Roger Moore telling us this. Yeah, I saw it.

It was in Roger Moore. It was in Modern Warfare 2. Yeah, yeah. Goldeneye. Goldeneye. All of these things that I trust as sources of information. Of course. It's what I did instead of, like, physics A-level.

They get the president out alive, and they get him onto a helicopter. There's a thing that i like in this scene the the marines they fly in and they they pull uh the the limo apart and they rescue him and i don't know if this is intentional or not but the way that this movie conveys radiation is this is good no this is really good i wrote this down as another like putting on my fucking like uh grading hat another decision i really like the entire scene where like they're pulling him out in the in the baltimore wasteland the entire scene where they're pulling them out of there is like really limited gray green palette like there's

a small amount of grain and noise over the whole thing i liked it i think it was an effective way to communicate it well i the thing is i don't know shit about cinema which is why i do this podcast. I do know a lot about esoteric weapons, and one thing I can tell you is that ionising radiation exposure absolutely fucks with film.

It really does. And so using film grain to convey radiation exposure is a very smart thing to do, whether you know that or not. Anyway, so Ryan survives, and Ryan's like, look, no way the Russians did this. It wasn't Nemirov. radiation exposure is a very smart thing to do whether you know that or not anyway so ryan ryan survives and ryan's like look um no way the russians did this it wasn't nemorov and the president's not going to believe that so the name of the game for the rest of the film is stop the president of the united states from retaliating against the russians and ending the

world yeah we see we see nemorov get uh get gotten out of bed where where the american president has two guys he only has like, one guy, who like, puts a dressing gown on and is like, oh, well, nuclear war might be starting, do you wanna come down to the bunker? Yeah. We- the president has to get on a plane, they, uh, okay, so, they land the National Airborne Operations Center, the so-called Nightwatch plane for him, that's bullshit, you don't land it for the

president that's the opposite of what it's for you put him on air force one he does it from there but okay fine it's a conceit whatever i think it's a cool plane i just wanted to talk about it the point is that it's flying around all the time so if the president gets caramelized along with all the milfs there's a guy already up there shit yeah uh but yeah so it's it's good we get the contrast with the opening like fire drill thing because everybody's panicking the guys like one of the guys can't get his chair to unfold and he just like throws it across the room it's this is a really good send-up of like the american sense of of nobility like because you see the one at the start where they're all so calm so normal then when it happens for real everyone's like fully bitch made the entire way i think it's a really really good scene i really like this

yeah and the president yells at everyone yeah it's good in fact in fact what he yells at everyone is uh this is too much goddamn bullshit which will be useful for me later on um we also see that the Nazis have a dude inside the Russian Air Force who tells his guys, hey, the Americans just need Moscow. Go and attack this American aircraft carrier in retaliation.

Yeah, which they do. And we see them almost sink it, which is, again, a very clancy thing of like, you can't actually have them sink it. That would be too bad. Yeah. So this escalates accordingly. Meanwhile, Ryan has to go and talk to, after the Neo-Nazis, the second greatest enemy of

America in the Tom Clancyverse. Nerds? Nerds? Well, I was gonna say, an officious black woman. Oh yes, yeah yeah yeah. Oh yeah. Because he goes to talk to the Air Force radiation team, and the captain in charge of that is like, yeah, take a number, we'll have a report out tomorrow, and it's like,

there was a nuclear weapon. What level of bureaucracy is it plausible to expect any of these people to be on, to be like, yeah, no, wait 24 to 48 hours. Yeah, we promise that we will get back to you in six months after the nuclear explosion. It's just deeply funny for there to be a nuke. Just be like, we have no interest in finding out where this came

from, actually. And like, the fucking, the racial component of this, it makes it like a worse version of the fucking receptionist scene from fucking Crash. It's really bad. bad but so he does end up getting her to like do what he wants which is patch him through to i fuck i don't even remember who the whole back half of this movie yeah it's just he speaks to some guys calling he does tell him the plutonium from this bomb was made in the united states this is the evidence that he needs. He goes to

see Morgan Freeman, who's like, oh, I've been in a nuclear explosion and I'm dying, but take my Palm Pilot and talk to Michael Byrne and see what he can do. He gently whispers Rosebud. Yeah. He also whispers girlfriend, like, hey, this is your girlfriend, okay? Girlfriend, alright, how's she doing?

He's trying to wingman him, even in the grips of dying. She'll love it! Do close-up magic! You gotta start drinking sparkling water, it's important. Sparkling. Water. We get the best product placement in this movie, which is, Ryan has to go to get to,

like, Mason, this school- like school shoes looking guy his work um and in order to do that he steals in the midst of a nuclear incident an immaculate gmc truck yeah just absolutely this shit is like not a dent on it it's perfect he he crashes it in the next scene before this goes any further driving through for exactly two and a half people in the audience, maybe the way that Alice just said water there, sparkling water, while trying to do an impression of a dying... That's how I normally say it.

Like a radiation-dying Andrew Tate. Sounded exactly like Xavier Renegade Angel. And that's why this is for two people. What is that? What are you talking about? am I being owned here? I don't know either, this is too deep even for me but anyway, the United States and Russia

are on MSN chat with each other and they're nudging each other and getting mad and then Ryan has a fight with Mongo in the docks which doesn't really tell him anything but basically he finds out that it's Hitler too yeah

he does try some field expedient torture of the Mongo guy it doesn't work, which I like, it doesn't tell him anything yeah some other shit that happens we get sort of the strange love thing here and this is all like, it's fine, it's plausible it's a plausible series

of like, the thing that seems like the plausible, it's a plausible series of like, the thing that seems like the least crazy decision out of a set of them actually culminates, it adds up to sort of a nightmare escalation. Where everybody's like, okay, we'll try a limited conventional response, and then maybe a bigger conventional response, and then maybe like a selective response. We see Kathy who is treating people who have had, like, MILFs and Femboy cheerleaders in her hospital. This is much nicer than it should be. I feel like you could have got some real horror here that mostly doesn't do. We also of course this being a nuke movie we have to see a guy get fucked up by acute radiation syndrome.

And so Clark who is in Israel I guess goes to see the guy who put his hand on the bomb, and that guy's fucked up. He's not even that fucked up compared to the guys in Chernobyl, but he is dying. No! No. He's, like, become bald. He's got really sunken eyes, yeah. Yeah, and he's like, it was this one guy, Olsen. The guy who's really happy all the time.

He's the most jerk van der Kloek. Son of a bitch. We now get to a point where the Americans are going to initiate something they call snap count, which is an attempt to destroy every Russian nuclear weapon in one go so that they can't retaliate, they'll be left with like 300 to 400, and then in a fantastically strange love line, the Secretary of Defense describes this as, he's probably gonna push back from the table and call it a night. Which I really like.

But so, they launch the stealth bombers, the B-2s, in order to do this. And Tom Clancy on the director's commentary track has a bit of a meltdown about this. Yes. Because he refuses to accept the plot hole of, do the russians know the stealth bombers have taken off when they're stealth bombers that's a good point and it did occur to me actually he really cannot get past this it's like uh i think he literally goes at one point do you know what the word stealth means so good it's not it's not that consequential a plot hole is the thing if i was the russians i would have a guy in the ground crew.

Yeah, for sure. They texted me. That's how I know. Hmm. Uh, so he goes to the Pentagon, he gets flown to the Pentagon, and Ryan does, and he tries to get in, but he sees that his ID card is actually Morgan Freeman's, and it's not working, he's like swiping and it's not working, it's working because it's been you know nuked up or whatever and the guard the cop there is like escalating a situation in the way that cops do of being like hey can you can you show me that

id card for a second uh and ryan doesn't want to do it because it's not his picture it says m on it which i'm trying to change it it's just really confident yeah it's been it's an old picture it's been a few years and he's like uh he used to be black again and the cop is like fully in like sir step away from the thing and then it just goes through and that cop goes from like 100 miles an hour to zero like it's like cold you absolutely cannot tell me that that would remove the tension the cop immediately is just like must have been the wind and just like walks away that's a bigger plot hole to me than the fucking b2 bombers is this cop being like going

from okay i have one hand on my pistol here to oh well probably nothing he's got like the full like one hand on the pistol the other hand like holding out to stop jack and then it goes and he just goes have you seen the high elves and you're like all right perfect man absolutely do you get to the pentagon district very often what am i saying of course you don't of course the president's about to order the final strike. The guys are lined up, they're like, in order to activate the strike, you have to do the penis inspection.

The president's like, yeah, fine. And Ryan insinuates his way into the Pentagon and gets on the hotline, which is like a teletype, and he starts texting the Russian president. He's wearing wearing by the way a sick turtleneck yeah he rules he looks cool kieran hines loves a turtleneck i've noticed

also they do the same thing that they did in red october where the inside of the american like command is on air force one which is really brightly lit and you know everyone like you can see everything inside of the russian nuclear bunker looks like the inside of a klingon warbird everything's like green and red and there's like beefing and it looks evil really insane yeah i don't know how you're supposed to like read anything in there it's really dark um but so he he he talks both sides out of nuclear war at once by talking about how nuclear weapons aren't at risk of being used in anger but out of fear and like fear of the past uh and like we gotta you know get away from this and also i can prove it was hitler too yeah it's quite a good theme

actually he's like look these like massive weapons are being used not out of any sense of strategy or kind of military advantage but just out of fear and i was like that is actually quite a good message probably also applies to a lot of what the c did, and also a lot of the conventional military, but okay. Oh, sure. We gotta kill this democratic reformer just in case shit gets too hostile for us. That kind of thing. So, President James

Cromwell, he gets snapped out of being bad president back into being good president. Because the Russians stand down. Yeah, and he calls off the strike. He puts his dick back away. And in a sort of very good president move Because the Russians stand down. Yeah, and he calls off the strike, he like, puts his dick back away. And in a sort of like, very good president move, he's like, oh, can I use the phone now that Jack Ryan's off of it? Yeah, again, everyone's like, everyone's like, violence level just goes down, and

other two they'll reset to friendly. Yeah. Jack Ryan's dialogue skill was 100 and he just talked them out of it yeah Ryan goes to see Kathy and she's just fine she's fine she's been treating people who have been

melted and torn up by broken glass she goes on to have two children so she's really fine she's so fine she doesn't even seem tired yeah she looks very good considering she's just been in a nuclear explosion i hope i'm half as good when i am and and then we we see that the the two presidents sign a big treaty together this is and we get godfather these scenes the most insane thing i've ever seen. This is the weirdest. The scene title in the synopsis is literally called Business Gets Handled.

Right? It's literally, it's genuinely the most insane, like, loose ends tie up I've ever seen in a fucking movie. Raising a glass once again after Air Force One to the specter of Russian-American joint black operations. They're literally playing Nasun Dorma. It's just... A thing that people have wanted to do forever and has never happened.

John Clark kills the guy in Damascus. They're playing Pavarotti over all of this. I cannot stress this enough for the audience, but they're playing Pavarotti while dudes get fucking ice cannot stress this enough for the audience but they're playing Pavarotti while dudes get fucking ice cubed 24-7 the Russian dude who ordered the strike

gets fucking got like Miller's crossing yeah it's two dudes like fully the Dutch angle upwards of two dudes pulling triggers and then the jerk van der Klerk gets his dome knifed, he gets his throat slit by Carter

yeah he's Hitler too wait is this is this music is it in the movie or is it not is it diegetic or not that's the fucking word because like it's playing

over the whole thing but then when we cut to olsen he's like like pretend maestroing it thank you i've got words in my mind um so is so is he legit i i yeah he he he dies and then hitler 2 tries to outwit them hitler 2 is like okay they're gonna try and kill me with a car bomb. Well, I'll have my guy get in, start the car while I'm across the street, and when it doesn't explode, I'll get in and drive off. Yeah. Hitler II has also been smoking the whole time,

and the vending machine's like a cigarette vending machine. His guy starts up the car, doesn't explode. I really enjoy his guy starting the car. It's like the most nervous cunt on god's earth. The way he stays like... Oh, thank god. I really enjoyed that. But Hitler 2 gets in the car, then he hits the cigarette lighter, and of course explodes.

It's the most insane villain death I've seen since The Rock. Maybe even more so. It was smart. I liked it. I liked the lighting. And it was Michael Byrne. Michael Byrne looks on in a flag up and goes, Ha ha ha, I'm Michael Byrne. And then Michael Byrne has to do one more ha ha ha, I'm Michael Byr license thing. But it was Michael Byrne! Michael Byrne looks on in a flak up and goes, ha ha ha, I'm Michael Byrne. Yeah. Yes. And then Michael Byrne has to do one more ha ha ha, I'm Michael Byrne thing, where he sees Jack and Kathy outside the White House, and he's like, hey, maybe I can be

a confidential source to you now, and also, uh, you're gonna get engaged. Here's a present. And they have not told anyone about this, and they're like, how do you know? And he's like, communist you know and he's like communist magic and that's what if what if a mole was your dad what if what if that what if that let's think about that for a minute i mean what if what if you had to fucking show a guy a dick to launch the nukes i what if they'd reduced baltimore to a slag heap what if it was formally called the former baltimore memorial wasteland

no they would they would call it like the morgan freeman memorial baltimore the glowing sea just yeah i so i mean don't worry about it. This movie's got a lot of misogyny in it, in that all of the tough decisions are made by men, even when women have, like, serious jobs, they're either your mum or, like, something that happens offscreen and then they're fine. They just handle that shit. Women be just internally handling shit, which is a rare sort of, like it's just for seeing all the men get up and leave because something important's happened and like it's just so like the visual language is just well the important men have gone now and now it's women now it's now it's women's hour here at the white house correspondence dinner yeah the first lady gets up and starts doing bits about women yeah that's good what's it say about masculinity um it's probably not good to like be too macho otherwise you might destroy all life on earth but on the other hand you have to well also that it

masks fear which i think is yeah it's true almost jack ryan does give a speech and it's it's not to the extent of how dare you sir speech which is an all-time high for this podcast and indeed humanity um but it it is a good speech where he's just yelling about like how everyone's too afraid to step down so it's just going to inexorably like continue to get worse and worse and it's fine it is delivered in a very cringe manner but it's not wrong it's a it's a shame that they don't really engage with fascism in in the 21st century like it's a shame that nobody at the end is like oh we because at the end the russian and american presidents like we've got to work together and like not kill each other but it's a shame that no one goes and also deal with the nazis right right because it turns out they're back like it's

a shame they don't really interrogate that well because we killed them we killed hitler too so it's over um i also see why this is sort of its own thing, why this reboot didn't last, is because one of the weirder features of the Tom Clancy, the Ryanverse, if you will, is that you have to do it in a world where 9-11 didn't happen, but Baltimore no longer

exists, and also the US capital got 9-11. 9-11 didn't happen, but there is no longer Baltimore. Yeah, there's just the waste waste you're watching The Wire in this timeline I'm sorry halfway through season one something happens there's a lot of great media that won't

be coming out of Baltimore but we have a science-based sister on this podcast it's called The Scum System stands for smarm, cultural insensitivity unprovoked violence, misogyny, how smarmy is this movie not nearly as smarmy as I think for instance Clear and Present Danger was

not as smarmy as it might have been yes, very true it's not even as kind of like all America as it could have been yeah, I'm pretty low I don't want to go to like a 2 but I could do a 3 for this I'm pretty low. I don't want to go to a two, but I could do a three for this. Okay, good three.

Yeah, I'm happy with that. Cultural insensitivity. Cultural insensitivity. Russians are warmongers, except when they want to be American. Arabs are stupid. Fuck, what else? I think that's pretty... Those are the two big hits of racism in this movie.

Yeah, like a vicious black woman uh oh fuck you suck you're so right yeah and i was the one who brought that up how do we feel about a four or five i it's bad but i would say a four it's not well i say it's nice it's it's different that it's broad at least that we're insulting lots of different groups of people rather than you know picking one punching bag. You wouldn't have used that excuse with Bond. I did use that excuse with Bond on one occasion, in fact. Yeah, and it was bad then. It was bad then too.

Unprovoked violence, there's a little bit of torture, it doesn't work though. Yeah, it seems more as like frustration than anything else. Genuinely not a ton of unprovoked violence. In fact, as always, Jack Ryan is attempting to stop any violence from occurring. He stops Clark from killing those two Ukrainian guys?

It's true. And also the film is kind of about how violence can appear justified even when it isn't as a result of decision-making going wrong. One or two? Shit. I think the only sort of oh yeah i'd say one even might be a one legitimately now only because the misogyny is is where violence is bad now misogyny on the other hand take it away women women really do the uh not working in important

jobs even when they're in the CIA they're mostly there to be like great job but by the way I'm pregnant even when they're doctors they're mostly there to be like I love you so much let's get married very much emphasising the role of care in being a doctor which in my experience

is a fucking joke we've seen in previous things she's an eye surgeon yeah that we see her scrubbing up in this one but even then she's talking about boys while she does it yeah this shit does not pass the best at us at all uh i don't know if it even passes the corollary that i invented that one time no i it's bad again like most of the ryan stuff it's like misogyny of omission rather than commission. Nobody turns to the camera and goes, like, women are silly.

But they're not serious actors. I would say 5. Okay. Well, that gives us a total score of 13. Which is the best Jack Ryan film. Just. It's not the best one to watch, but morally, I'm afraid it's in controversy. It's got the most scenes where I have earnestly said I like the way this one is done. The movie, not great. I like

the grading. It's half what Clear and Present Danger got, so at least they're getting better. Fucking hell, Jesus Christ. At least they don't have to deal with Willem Dafoe's John Clark There's only one Jack Ryan film left now as well They did There's Shadow Recruit from 2014

but last year they did do a John Clark movie and I don't know if we want to toss it on the end as a victory lap Did they? They did, Michael B. Jordan as John Clark Yeah, I'll i'll do it that would be very interesting i do actually want to see that yeah yeah yes yeah that's interesting because of like the ways in which clancy writes about john clark and the kinds of masculinity he's supposed to do

all right we're very quickly going to become kill john clark um but so the next one then the next mainline episode is going to be uh jack ryan shadow recruit means the next bonus is going to be kung fu hustle have we ever tried to kill someone whose first name didn't begin with a j uh not yet but we'll get there they're gonna run out of j's at some point what's the what's the what's the guy in mission impossible called ethan yeah we're gonna kill ethan Hunt we'll get to him at some point yeah at some point in the timeline yes we'll get to him

in the meantime we'll get to you thank you for listening to Kill James Bond we have a Patreon you can subscribe to it subscribe to it if you ever want us

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we don't have anything to award for this movie. No rosettes. Nothing came out of me. There's no one who has a one-scene thing. I miss my Cronsteins. I miss my Kaufmans. Actually, no. You know what? Cronstein to the French guy who's like, actually, I think we should

maybe not be in the plan anymore. That guy. I think he deserves it. He's a good night cross because he decides to not do the plan. Oh, fuck, you're right. Yeah, good night guy. I think he deserves it. He's a good night cross, because he decides to not do the plan. Oh, fuck, you're right, you're right. Yeah, good night cross. Okay, good. Excellent. Well, bye. Thank you for listening to yet another episode

of Kill James Bond. That's right, I am back. Do not you worry. They couldn't keep me away for that long um the next episode of Kill James Bond in two weeks time

is of course Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit where as they were wont to do in the mid 2010s they rebooted the series and gave it to one of the Hollywood Chris's to deal with I literally don't recall which one

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