Upstream - S2E9: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Alright, after taking a brief vacation to the land of Lazenby, it's time to return to Jack Ryan. This one is a modern reboot from 2014 that is somehow equal parts James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Alex Rider Stormbreaker. A shady Russian capitalist plans to cause 9/11 2. Thats the plot of the movie. ------ THE WINTER OF CONTENT Owing to the increasing cost of living and general misery of being alive in the UK right now, from next month the bonus episodes will be posted on the free feed until the spring solstice or the collapse of the British state, whichever is earlier. So if you feel like you're in a position where you're going to need to cut down on your outgoings, please cancel your subscription to us. If you do feel you have money to spare, please consider supporting your local food banks with money or time! donate to the Trussell Trust here: https://www.trusselltrust.org/make-a-donation/ or the Independent food aid network here: https://www.foodaidnetwork.org.uk/donate There are several ongoing strike funds that could do with some donations, and several can be found here: https://www.cwu.org/ Additionally, please consider joining a renter's union like ACORN, as rising mortgage rates will surely result in rising rent, here: https://www.acorntheunion.org.uk/join ------ 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/ Kill James Bond is hosted by Alice Caldwell-Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com and https://twitter.com/killjamesbond

Hi, Devin here. This is just a reminder that owing to the increasing cost of living and general misery of being alive in the UK right now, from the start of next month, our bonus episodes will be being posted on the free feed as well until either the spring solstice or the collapse of the British state. Whichever one of those comes earlier. So if you are in a position where you're going to need to cut down on your outgoings, please feel free to cancel your Patreon membership with us. If you do have some money to spare, there are a number of links to charities in the description. Further, if you are a member of the Royal College of Nursing Union, you have a strike ballot on your desk please respond to that additionally public and communication service union members are also being balloted for strikes right now please get those in if you have them all right thank you i'm in the cia

jesus you weren't kidding you are in the CIA. Jesus, you weren't kidding. You are in the CIA. Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I'm Alex Caldwell-Kelly. I'm joined, as ever ever by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devin. How are you doing? We watched Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit. It's been a minute since we watched a Tom Clancy movie and I do not miss them. This is better than I thought it was going to be. It's kind of weirdly halfway between James Bond and Jason Bourne. See, that's what I thought. I watched this and I was like, this isn't a Jack Ryan movie for the first part. No, it basically isn't. But the thing is, right, I was kind of done with Jack Ryan.

I was dragging my feet about watching this. I'm like, I don't want to watch it because it's going to be mediocre. There's not going to be anything interesting for me to say about it. I was wrong about that second part but um i i guess i i figured that like um you know tom clancy died in 2013 or something and now that he wasn't around to like um terrorize directors on their own dvd commentaries like he is with the sum of all fears hollywood decided they would do another run at jack Jack Ryan and try and make this like a franchise movie. And I pray God they never make another one of these with this cast because it's bad.

It's really bad. It's not great. It's not great. It's not that bad. I have some thoughts about this, but we begin with literally Jason Bourne's music. You know the like... Yeah, familiar. you know the like uh yeah familiar yeah essentially what you want to do is you want to take like one and every five notes out of that and then that's jack ryan music that's right um this is like

serial numbers filed off stuff yeah it's good we open in london and we do my favorite thing that a movie can do which is wide shot of a bunch of landmarks and then London. Just to be like, Big Ben, House of Parliament, lastminute.com presents the London Eye, and then it just goes London at the bottom, and you're like, yes! It's typed in, like, it's typed in. Which is also a Bourne thing. Do you know what else this movie's like? I want to put this up here.

What else? It's somewhat James Bond, it's somewhat Bourne. It's also quite heavily Alex Rider's Stormbreaker. You're right. It is the fish out of water stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I found it to be. Because they really play into, like, one of Jack Ryan as a character's biggest conceits,

which is, I'm an analyst. I'm a field guy. I'm not a field guy. I'm a desk guy. But somehow, due to, like, a combination of circumstances, I've been forced into doing the field stuff. So they really lean into that. But we begin with Chris Pine, America's most 40-year-old college student.

And you can tell he's a college student because he has a Jansport. Yeah, and you can tell this is a flashback because he's lying down on a bench, and you can't do that anywhere in London anymore. Yeah. Yes, yeah. Lying on top of a bunch of economic textbooks. And he is woken up by a guy nudging him and going,

excuse me, mate, 9-11 is happening. Fantastic. He senses a disturbance in the force and like wakes up to find that, oh God, 9-11 has happened. It's really the funniest conceivable way to start a movie is your main character sees

9 11 happen he wakes up it's the joke answer for how we would start a cycle absolutely he he wakes up he goes for a walk through the historic cambridge district of london uh where everybody is like you know reacting to the news that 9-11 has happened, sees that 9-11 has happened, and some random guy we never see again comes up to him, puts a hand on his shoulder and goes, you're American, aren't you? Sorry, mate.

Great. It's nice. Yeah. Because 9-11 has happened, this has radicalized him in the good question mark way, and he immediately joins uh the u.s marines as an officer they you know and we we cut from 2001 september london to 2003 where he is in afghanistan which is first of all seems fast to me to have like a year and change

like to be a marine officer they're gonna teach you how to like eat the crayon with the knife and fork it takes a long time right but anyway what he does dropped out of of school to join the u.s marines out of the lse and and so now he is a lieutenant in the u.s marine corps where he doesn't really have a job like he's he's not in command of anything he just is in a helicopter with two guys one of whom is his hype man yeah he exists to like say things like yeah he's like i'm a friend to the men yes he's he's a friend to the men and the men are all telling him about how smart and patriotic he is. It's how I envisioned being a junior officer. They make it really obvious as well that he could have been like a desk guy but he chose to be

in the helicopter. Like they're looking directly at the camera. I think one of the guys even says like, why aren't you behind a desk? He goes, oh I said I wanted to serve and I'm gonna serve. Damn it. We also see that he's written a bunch of like reports like intelligence reports that just people ignore nobody reads them um and he's helping one of

his men do their harness up uh when they get shot down and his his back is broken the thing is right an rpg is a device made in the soviet union that fires a bunch of really fast Bourne-style cinematic cuts at you. And so the helicopter gets hit by an RPG and this really fucks with the cinematography. This movie makes a lot of choices cinematography-wise that are

baffling, completely unexplainable but I do love every one of them and I will highlight them as they come past. The editing in the action scenes is not will highlight them as i come past the editing and the action scenes is not quite as good as the editing and the talkie scenes so so we get what for me is i think the bit that the movie does best which is he is horrifically injured in his back we get him going through the like various casualty clearing stations and field hospitals and so forth and it's it's nicely horrific. They've gotten really good

at doing trauma makeup. Oh yeah, my man looks messed up. He is fucked up looking. He looks like the mummy before he got in Potap's face. He's fucked up. It is nicely horrific.

I don't know if this is accurate or not, but one thing that surprised me is they don't seem to do any pain control at all. They're like, hey, we're gonna turn you over and this is gonna hurt a lot, instead of slamming a bunch of morphine into them. I don't know. But anyway, it's effective, is the thing. And we hear that he has carried his two dudes out of the helicopter wreckage with a broken back. Not the pilot, though. Fuck that guy.

Yeah, pilot, co-pilot, both dead. If they had any door gunners, dead. Those two guys, though, because they were telling him how smart he was, he has rescued them. Not in the film again, but... No. I do like that we don't see this. I feel like any way that you had actually made it explicit by filming it

would have been the worst for it. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, for sure. I like it better unspoken but so he gets his back fucked up and he goes to walter reed army medical center which is weird for a marine you'd think it would be bethesda but he goes there and it looks this is still supposed to be 2003 and it looks like some star trek shit which it might be now but um there's glass all over the gaff it's like an adult playpen in the middle with a bunch of soft shapes that everyone's

walking around with and at this point we get someone I love to see might I say a wooga? Keira Knightley rolls into this fucking movie I'll be honest I don't like her in don't i don't like her

in this movie this i i don't like the direction i don't like the way that she's chosen to to play the character but she is kathy ryan soon to be kathy muller at this point well the thing the thing about kira knightley is that she is really very good at playing a uh a sort of Regency era British woman that's not a ton of anything else no she's fucking good at that though yeah it's kind of odd to see this like Regency era British woman just with an American accent

because I'm like there's just something about this is like slightly off it's not the best American accent and also this is something I'll get into later, she's played and written, I think, as kind of a bit of a manic pixie dream girl. Yes. One thing that you notice, and you can't stop noticing it, is that she does too

much with her lips. She's acting predominantly with her lips in this movie. She bites her lips, she moves them around a bit anytime she needs to like emote and it's really distracting and annoying i'd like to do some acting with kira knightley's lips as well but also it's not the character in the movie with the worst accent that does the most lip shit so that's that's true that is true that's probably why i didn't pick up on that is that she's very much overshadowed by i i also i don't like that they make kathy his doctor because as they acknowledge in the movie and then immediately move past it's kind of bad boundaries

to to to date a patient or even really sometimes a former patient um but but she she teaches him how to do PT by like being Keira Knightley at him being like you can do this and also not get addicted to Percocet because I'm going to move my lips just use your willpower don't become a drug addict

just say no as he is struggling to get himself back up on his crotch he sees a guy who has lost his lower leg and this this inspires him to be like, ah, my own vertebrae that has been reduced to the consistency of apple crumble, that's nothing. Yeah. Which is an object lesson in how certain kinds of masculinity work, right? Yeah. That wasn't unusual, Sean.

Arm hanging off my thread. That guy's got like, that guy's missing both arms this is nothing to me i'm you know just genuinely to be like yeah i have an absolutely life-threatening like life-changing injury but that guy does have it slightly worse so i should shut the fuck up and just recover and he does which is nice uh just sort of puts himself back together no sweat um we also we also have to see shot from behind at this point having a sort of shadowy conversation with his doctor kevin costner as white james l jones as america as yes america brackets james l jones brackets white um now kevin costner's deal is his other deal is telling everybody that he's in the CIA.

Yeah, Kevin Costner immediately winning the Brian Cox Memorial Award for Intelligence. It's actually on his, like, ribbons when he's in naval uniform, yeah. And so he corners Ryan pretty quickly once he's, like, learned to willpower himself better. And tells him him you know hey you can still serve your country even with your your fucked up spine uh by joining the cia i kind of like the joke that he tells everyone that he's in the cia yeah i kind of like it too it's it's funny because the line on the script would like ryan says how do you know all this stuff about me and the line on the script is just i'm in the cia and you could play that a million different ways

and i just thought it was an interesting decision by kevin costa to play it as a joke like he just Ryan says, how do you know all this stuff about me? And the line on the script is just, I'm in the CIA. And you could play that a million different ways. And I just thought it was an interesting decision by Kevin Costner to play it as a joke. Like he just does it in a stage whisper. Kind of like a waggly eyebrows moment. It's just like, I'm in the CIA. And they're like, ooh. It's a fun decision to play it that way. Yeah, absolutely.

And so what a smarter movie would have done at this point, this movie only does implicitly, which is it plays these as twin seductions, right? Ryan is getting better, he is trying to seduce Kathy, and the CIA is trying to seduce him. That's never explicit, and I think- Kevin Costner constantly wiggles his lips a lot. Viewers are morons, you have to tell them. Where's the corset? Yeah, manic pixie dream, Costner. I don't- to tell them. Yeah, manic pixie dream, Costner.

I'm not a fan of manic pixie dream, Costner. This is a very weird set of scenes. My only note on this is the phrase, eye doctor pussy got me running laps in the rain, which is a thing that he does. He does do that. So as he's running laps in the rain rain thinking about Keira Knightley and her weird lips, Kevin Costner stops him and is like, I'm in the CIA.

Jesus, you weren't kidding, you are in the CIA. I'm always being taken. And here we get some politics, because, uh, so the movie is aware that people might not like the CIA. What? And here's how it handles this fucking idea. You know, people don't like you guys very much these days. Waterboarding, rendition.

Not my unit. Oh, okay. And then he clarifies afterwards. And that's genuinely, yeah. Like, what unit's your unit? He's like, we're the ones that stop us getting hit again. And I'm like, no, no, no. That was the one that was doing the waterboarding no no no wasn't the fucking

accounts department doing that you don't get to fucking be like that was someone else although it was me i did it kevin costner is in the cia's anti-911 unit uh they all took the second week of september off it's a real shame for the first time they weren't around to prevent 9-11 and then 9-11 happened but they are back and they're willing to prevent somebody leant on a button in the office

that said cause 9-11 and they're like oh no they flipped the big switch from 9-11 from off to on we're like oh fuck well the thing is that switch has a secret third setting which is 9-11 too and Kevin Costner's job is to make sure it never gets set to that.

Perpetual 9-11. They're in the anti-9-11-2 unit, has nothing to do with the torture unit or the rendition unit, those weren't his units. And he says, like, because Ryan identifies that correctly as a bullshit excuse, he says you can do better. And what he says is, I do and so do my team every day. Which is such a fucking lib thing to be like the internal

resistance of the CIA to the torture program. CIA, welcome to the resistance. Yes! Genuinely yes. Unbelievable. Every day that I don't torture someone is a day that I'm making the CIA a better place. Unfortunately, Tortures George is massively running up the average.

Woke CIA agent. I can't do anything to stop him, but I am shaking my head, so everyone knows I disagree with it. And this is asked and answered, right? It's like, okay. That's the end of the scene. That's the end of that. I thought a cleverer film would have done something with this idea that Jack Ryan joins the Marines

out of a sense of patriotism and he is hurt and then he joins the CIA, kind of like falling for the propaganda again. I thought we were going to go somewhere with this, but we kind of don't really. No, like this- Arguably the film's villain sort of engages with it but only obliquely we go from this scene of like uh i'm in the cia but i'm in the in the nice cia to ryan going okay and then we get the title card it just flat cuts to jack ryan shadow recruit yeah so, so Kevin Costner has quite an interesting plan, actually.

He does say, look, you're not going to be out there doing torturing and stuff. What we want you to do is we're going to pay for you to go back to the LSE, finish your PhD in economics, and then we are going to send you into Wall Street to be a kind of finance banker guy. Nobody's going to know that secretly you're actually working for the CIA, and your job is

to uncover people who are funding terrorism it's like financial intelligence a podcast i really like this i i wrote down this is a fun premise like i was genuinely great premise i was like oh cool looking forward to this yeah and any kind of like quasi normal job that's actually the cia great three days of the condor also great podcasting but so yeah so he works in the um the give me good numbers jimmy office of uh a large investment firm where he walks around he he meets his colleague who has a motorcycle because he's trying to impress a girl and his colleague is kind of dorky and he

like helps him out he like sets him up with this girl also at one point he sits next to a whiteboard that just has the word trans written on it a million times, which I go off. Okay. Yeah, me too. This is an audio medium so you can't see that, but it's just right behind me, it's trans everywhere, all over the whiteboard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so we see that he is like chasing down some suspicious transactions in a Russian bank. At the same time, the UN is voting on some intrigue. And we get a weird scene where there's like a US diplomat talking to a Russian diplomat and they both look exactly alike. Yeah, that's slightly weird. The moment it was like the first guy walked in and started doing a bad Russian accent, I was like, oh, okay, all right, this is the movie. Perfect. Oh, we'll talk about some bad Russian action. But yeah, Russian

Gaevich is like, we will regard this as a kind of economic war. This is plot of movie. We can't control entire financial system and now Main Street USA is going bankrupt because of us. That's the plot of the movie, by the way. Yes.

What I will say is that we get the return of a shot that we've not of the movie by the way yes uh what i will say is that we we get the return of a shot that we've not seen in quite some time and i do always enjoy which is guy on the computer through the glass always good that's true yep always fun um so he thinks he has figured something out and he goes to meet his contact um at a you know dime square movie showing of you know something with dashasha or whatever. And he hands him off the thing and we get immediately, we're like nine minutes into the movie at this point, and we immediately hit the big Jack Ryan beat of, I can't go to Moscow, I'm just an analyst.

And the guy going, yeah, he's going to fucking Moscow. Yeah, because he thinks that the Russians, there's like a bunch of accounts in the in their russian partners firm that they can't see and why it's like this is like suspiciously big payments it might be funding terror and so they're like well go to moscow and audit the accounts um also he's still with kira knightley and she finds his like movie ticket stub and she's like she's suspicious of him she's like oh why are you like are you cheating on me you're having an affair and at no point does he go you are kira knightley he's like hang on a minute mate i'm

sorry you misunderstood unless you have a twin sister the answer to that question is obviously no yeah she's just out doing manic pixie dream eye doctor shit and she finds this like the tickets also neither of them have aged in the 10 years that is supposed to have happened yeah also it's shot weirdly flatly like they have an argument about this and it's it's like the worst argument between a couple i've seen not starring harry styles in the last like 30 years of movies it is truly he's like uh weird how there's eight mustards in the fridge and none of them go with my sandwich. Yeah, it's really weirdly laid out as well. It's just shot, reverse shot, over and over, and you're like,

what? Yeah. To be fair, it all feels like perfunctory, right? Because we've seen enough Jack Ryan origins at this point to know that you have to have Kathy in it, she has to be upset at Jack, and then at the end they reconcile. And it's like... I kind of at Jack, and then at the end they reconcile.

I kind of like what they do with Kathy later in this film. I don't. We'll get to this. At this point, we have to go to Russia and see our antagonist, and as soon as I saw the back of this motherfucker's head, I wrote down, Kenneth Branagh loves two things

most in this life. The first thing that Kenneth Branagh loves two things most in this life. The first thing that Kenneth Branagh loves is directing himself. And the second thing that he loves is directing himself to do a reprehensible accent. Kenneth Branagh in this movie... Let me tell you something, Jack. Un-fucking-real. something good, Jack. Un-fucking-real.

Kenneth Branagh, genuinely, his way of playing the Russian bad guy is to purse his lip so hard that there's just no lip visible at all, and then just do, like, Mr. Ryan, we see there is nothing you possess. Let me tell you something good, Jack.

The thing about Kenneth Branagh is that he is currently working... The thing about Kenneth Branagh is the main thing I like to remember about Kenneth Branagh is that he is currently working in the British film and theatre industry and is a very powerful

and influential man. So my agent has just handed me a note reminding me that I really liked this film and I enjoyed his directing and acting in the film. Abby, it's fine. We're just going to, everything that we say about this movie, about Kenneth Branagh, about his action, direction, all of this, we know this because you said to us very enthusiastically before we started recording. Yeah, yeah. We're just transliterating, basically.

These are your views, but it's fine if you don't feel confident to express them. So anyway- Not even the views of Kill James Bond, it's just solely- No, it's just Abby. Abby, yeah. It's just Abby, yeah. Shame. Weird, yeah.

But so he's getting an injection, and the guy injecting him with the thing hurts him, and he slaps him across the room, from which we can deduce two things. One, he is violent, he is a brutal man two he is almost certainly dying and that's the impetus for him to do the evil shit because he's like on the clock like mitski he works better under a deadline um fair enough so like you can see parents have a very interesting family history yeah uh we but you can kind of see the terms this movie is taking ahead of you. He goes to meet some Russian leader in the woods, and the Russian leader is like, it is time to activate secret plan.

But no one can know of secret plan. What I like is the idea that the Kremlin... Essentially, the guy just goes, President Putin has always been very concerned of the appearance of financial impropriety, which is not the case. There is something quite interesting, or quite clever about this scene. You're bad guys are Russian, right?

But Kenneth Branagh... Fun fact about Kenneth Branagh, born in Belfast, it's just a little Branagh fact. Kenneth Branagh doesn't speak Russian yeah he still has the accent too let me tell you

something good Jack Kenneth Branagh doesn't speak fluent Russian so something quite clever they do in this scene is they shoot

them from behind a few trees so occasionally the actors are like passing behind the trees they shoot them

from quite far away it's a full body shot so you can't see their lips moving and Kenneth Branagh has almost no lines in this scene it's just like yes minister no minister and the you you cast an actor who can actually speak fluent russian as the guy who's doing the majority of the talking and they do that a lot in this film

is that whenever the main characters or like the english or british actors um don't who don't speak russian have to speak they like shoot them from behind it's just it's a quite clever way of disguising the fact that like they don't speak russian i enjoy it it's well done it has robbed me of my favorite tom clancy bit which is they zoom in on a guy's mouth and he's speaking and then they say a word that's the same and then you know that they've switched from russian to english it was really good in a hunt for red october and it's just getting worse and worse we also do this thing because we're in r, so we get, again, establishing shot of Red Square. It says, Russia.

And again, you're like, yes. I know what Red Square... I know where Red Square is, man. I'm not mistaking St. Basil's Cathedral for anything else. So back in New York, Ryan's boss is, like, warning him about going to Russia. He'll agree to send him to audit these accounts, but he's like, you gotta be careful there, it's a corporation, not a country.

They're still ideologues, but the ideology is money. And that is a great fucking time capsule misread of Putinism, That's one for the ages right there. Because a lot of very smart, very serious people believed this of Putin for a long time. I would say very few Russians did, but a lot of Western observers were like, oh yeah, it's just, you know,

it's just naked greed. And it's like, well, not just. There is a quite interesting moment, though, where Ryan says, yeah, I understand what you mean. Like, a quite interesting moment, though, where Ryan says, yeah, I understand what you mean. They're doing capitalism, we're doing capitalism. We're all in the same boat, so don't rock the boat. And the guy says, it's not a boat, it's a luxury yacht,

and we're all in it together. Which is quite nice, actually. It's like, no, no, we, the American ruling class and the Russian ruling class, have an alliance here that is against the working class of both countries. So don't fuck it up, Jack Ryan. Of course, the person who fucked it up in the end was Putin, but yeah, no, absolutely. So we at this point have the how couples argue these days argument. One thing I did notice,

the set decoration is really good. In the, when they have the argument, they have a little throw pillow that's a Snellen eye chart, because she's an eye doctor and it's cute. It's nice. It is nice! Like, there are a lot of little things. If you're noticing that, though... Yeah. Yeah.

While the drama's happening, I'm just looking at the background of a scene and being like, oh, those are good paintings they've got in the background, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's not. But so, so that they argue she's like why don't you ever take me anywhere i want to go to moscow i want to go to paris uh and and his thing is well why won't you marry me um and she doesn't want to which fair enough whatever he goes to moscow we see red square again we get the big Moscow trail again. It's like Moscow, and I'm like, I can see the word Lenin on screen right now. Yeah, we do meet a guy.

We do. We meet MB Deng, who is Ryan's bodyguard and driver for the Shraven group, Kenneth Branagh's company, the one that we see that he's investigating. Huge Ugandan dude, who is going to bodyguard him. Could be an interesting character. Is played well, and interestingly, except for this one thing that I think is direction, where he ends every line by doing a little chuckle. It's sort of like, someone has come in and been like no give give me like ugandan odd job

and so god you're right oh fuck every every line he does and again it's one of those things once you notice it you can't you can't unring the bell uh everything he says is like oh great view of moscow oh god you're right man that's that's that's me. That's his laugh that he does when he's thinking about betraying you in a minute. And he does. Yeah, he does, because Ryan's like, oh, well, this is a cool hotel room. He's like, oh, you should check out the view.

And then the second he does, he tries to kill him with a pistol with a suppressor on it. A silenced gun. The thing about the silencer is that it makes the gun silent which is why it's called that um yeah yeah what it what it does is it it makes a pistol make a kind of like noise oh we're all familiar with the noise we've all played a first person shooter it goes you know and you're like oh uh yeah and so he he and ryan fight in this hotel room. There are lots of, like, silenced gunshots going on. Outside, there is a maid working with a vacuum cleaner.

And so, like, this is a plot point in the movie, is how quiet this is, that she turns off the vacuum cleaner for a second, and she still can't hear anything. Not how they work. Really not right. Soundproof door, maybe? I don't know, it didn't bother me. How do they work?

Well, I mean, okay, so what a suppressor, not a silencer, what a suppressor does is it makes a gunshot quieter, however it's still a very loud sound because that's what a gunshot is. Like, there are things you can do, there's other things you can manipulate but by and large what you're like what you're talking

about is reducing the ability to determine that something is a gunshot but not that it's a loud noise or where it is um but so they fight they get into the bathroom from casino royale because every spy's first kill has to be in the bathroom The thing about being a spy is you just get really nice hotel rooms It is a nice room It is really a nice room This is such a nice hotel room Remember how bad

Sean Connery's hotel room was in like fucking From Russia With Love Oh my god ridiculous The standards of living for spies have like gone up vastly Premier't like a fucking vastly premier in on that one he's got like three perfect chocolates on a plate on his pillow not just one three they're not even wrapped i mean delightful i would love to see two spies having a fight to the death in the bathroom of a premier in that would be really good

but you couldn't get a fucking camera in there, you couldn't get two dudes in a fucking bathroom in a premiere, never mind two dudes in a camera crew. Yeah. So Ryan is like smaller than Deng, he's like injured because of his back, they're fighting and like, to gain the upper hand, what he does is he gets the gun and he fires it next to both of their ears in a way that does not deafen him, but does deafen the other guy. Yep.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I'm circling back again to, what volume is this supposed to be, right? If it deafens you if it's right next to you, but you can't hear it from another room. Alright, let me put this to you, hang on. I'm still thinking about it. Let me put this to you. Not a Jack Ryan fight in a premiere Inn, but a Jackie Chan one. Isn't that basically The Foreigner?

I think Jackie Chan could... Oh, fuck he does. Yeah, but it's less... It's not as choreographed as his earlier work. I think a Jackie Chan fight in a Premier Inn... He's not doing a travelodge bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get you.

He's not using the weird sort of boner sheet they give you to grab a guy's arms or whatever. He's not blinding a guy by getting a lot of hand soap and just going... The thing about having your shower and toilet in the same floor space is that it's very convenient to clean up the blood after you bash someone's head off the toilet.

This movie is so good that we're now imagining better movies. That's how good it is at holding your attention. Thank you very much to director Kenneth Branagh for this great film. So he drowns Deng in the bathtub, which I thought was quite creative. Does make you work

for it, did he? Well, never mind. The second one is... Second one is... Second one... This guy's too big to be the first kill. I'm giving you the accent drop again. Let me tell you something, Jack. Just one of the accents of all time.

Yeah, yes. So he flees the room, having killed the guy. He's, like, shaking. Chris Pine does Guy in shock very well. He does this really well. And he calls the same operator from three days of the condor and they rip off this is the three days of the condor they call the panic officer yes now that it's in two movies i i'm now forced to believe that it's a real thing it's gotta be um

and and they do the same conversation where she asks him because a girl now because feminism she asked him are you intact um and he doesn't remember where the like and what any of the codes mean and so he breaks protocol like three days of the condor and she like breaks protocol too she's like well this is where you have to go you're a marine you'll get through this and i'm like okay but if that kind of like niceness and helps, why wouldn't you just do it to start with? Yeah, it's quite awful. If you're calling for help, why shouldn't they fucking act like you're mum in the

first place, you know? This is the CIA, you silly little sausage line, how can I help you? You ring him up and they're like, how are you doing? Yeah. Do you need anything, bestie?

So they're like, like okay just fuck around it's like hey babes what's up how you doing genuine would genuinely be more helpful on your blokes line can you yeah yeah 100 um but so this is this she she tells him just hang around moscow for a bit and then go to the location point Gamma where you'll be met and he sees he says your feelings are valid yes but so he walks around Moscow and he gets scared he thinks a taxi is following him

there's a really nice touch which is before he I think a lesser film from a director who wasn't Kenneth Branagh would have just cut to him walking around Moscow. But before we do, he goes back to the hotel room and we see him look at the corpse and he's disturbed by it. Like, oh, that's actually quite a nice touch, actually. We're sort of remembering the human cost here.

Yeah, there are some, like, honestly pretty good shots in this one. Like, there's a really good close-up shot of him looking at the chocolates that have been put back on the bed. A really close-up shot of him, handheld, so it's shaking a little bit. He gets startled by a phone ringing. He sells it. He sells it really well. Probably going through it.

As he is going through it with this taxi potentially following him around, women being emotionally needy, be calling you, be texting you, be like, hey bestie, what's up? God, I would hate to be called and texted all the time by Chex Notes, Kiera Knightley! This is my Diana Rigg moment, right? It's just, Kiera Knightley! What are you talking about? Why did you leave the house where she was?

I don't see it, I might have to, like, hand in my lesbian card, I don't see it, I might have to like, hand in my lesbian card, I don't see it. But so, the funniest emotional import, right, is he sees this fucking taxi cab following him around, and he gets her on the phone, and he's like, I dunno when I'm gonna be back, implication, because I might be killed, don't lose faith in me. And what she does, after this huge emotional moment, what she says is, there's a beat of solid silence and she says, Okay. Just phenomenal.

And this is also my reaction to this movie. It's just- Again, the direction is fantastic, and apparently really did a phenomenal job with that one. Tries to set something up, and I'm just like, Okay. You see the reminder after the set up and you I'm just like, Okay. You see the reminder after the setup, and you're like, okay,

alright. So he goes to the meetup point where he sees Kevin Costner. It's Kevin Costner again, who is very good at this handler stuff, because he's, like, gentle and fatherly. He has a dog that we later learn that he has just stolen

for having an excuse to like walk around with um and i like also that they put the lie to the oh i'm in the better than the rest of the cia unit morally uh thing because he's like oh yeah my first my first time i killed someone i killed an innocent woman for no reason because she like came up behind me and i thought she was gonna murder me at no point does anyone say why are you still employed no because that's that's that's good that's you know the thing that they want from you kind of on the other hand i feel as if the movie still thinks that this is different and morally superior to waterboarding somebody because you're like you're in the field you know you're doing ops shit um so at this point one of one of my least favorite genres of conversations which is

uh smart guy being like i'm stealing this from a tweet i don't remember who's uh they're hacking into a mainframe dumb guy explain that to me in english poindexter smart guy sir they're fucking our pussies i literally wrote down they're fucking our pussies at this point because this is a cultural that tweet is a touchstone for me. It's a touchstone, yes. They're fucking our pussies, and the closer of that is action guy, cocks gun, now

you're talking my language. Yeah, but the pussies that they're fucking, it's not like technical this time, it's financial. They fucked the financial pussy. I put my head in my hands. I didn't do the 20 minutes of how suppressors work. But this isn't how markets work. So, Ryan, working off of nothing, has deduced- Yeah, vibes. Working off of some accounts-

Yeah, a Jack Ryan deduction here, just vibes. No fucking idea. He has worked this out based on accounts he can't see and Ugandan oddjob trying to kill him. He has deduced that Russians are gonna do 9-11 too, at the same time- Yeah, they are! At the same time, they're gonna sell off all of their, like, treasury bill holdings, which are in the trillions, and thus crash the dollar, they'll recover, and they're gonna

start the Great Depression too. And the reason why this isn't, like, the reason why they're gonna be fine, and it's gonna be bad for the US, is, and Ryan says this, we don't have their oil reserves. US is a- Have you heard of Texas?! Have you heard of a man named Barack Hussein Obama? Have you heard of, like, shale oil? Motherfucker, RuPaul has oil reserves. Have you heard of shale oil? Motherfucker, RuPaul has oil reserves.

The US has a massive net export of oil. What are you talking about, Jack? Un-fucking-believable. A man is dead. Also, 9-11-1 didn't crash the dollar why would why would 9-11 after 9-11-1 they just they just suspended trading it is later a key plot point that after they pull 9-11-2 they are going to suspend trading again it's it genuinely it's like one of the three worst things that have ever happened to America. Great Depression, Cold War, 9-11. There you go.

It's all of these. That's the plot of Jack, Crying Shadow Recruit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It even says it's going to cause a second Great Depression. It's like, oh shit. The stark warning here, right? Because all Tom Clancy things are like, this is dangerously plausible. It almost never is.

But the thing that is dangerously plausible this time is, ah, we've made a mistake financializing our economy, because now it's so tied up with Russia's that they can just detonate our economy at any time and not hurt themselves. Listen, I know hindsight is 20-20, and I know that it's easy to make fun of this now, and so I will. This is the dumbest shit I've ever heard. It doesn't work that way. We've had it proven to us now that it doesn't work that way. Yeah, Russia are perfectly capable of fucking their own economy.

They're fucking their own pussies yeah so so in order to forestall the russians fucking our pussies kevin costner gives him a gun and he's like well this this bit is quite clever because jack ryan says um the fund transfers the selling off of the dollars you can't just like sit it down at a computer and do that like with a mobile banking app You've got to pre-program that in. So if we can hack into Cherovan's mainframe and fuck his pussy, they'll be planning to sell off the dollars right after 9-11-2

happens. So all we have to do is figure out when he's planning to sell, and we'll have the approximate date and time of 9-11-2. Yeah. We're weirdly 9-11 again. Thought they'd go for the anniversary, I guess. Not as good as 9-11. He hands him the gun, he's like, you're operational now.

Which is like... He's already killed a guy. In country, he was doing an operation! And then he leaves him with the abandoned dog, which is a nice shot, doesn't have as much malice as I think the movie... I mean it has it's more malicious than the movie i thought the dog was gonna come back but no no no yeah because the next shot is jack ryan walking up a staircase and like the entire time he's being revealed as he walks up i was like come on come on come on yeah i wanted the dog to be there at least he's just dropped the dog back off um but so at this point we now have to get into another theme of this movie which is that the russian orthodox church is spooky uh anytime we we got

to talk about was this scene about it's the russian equivalent of the moez and filling time right this is just like yeah it's it genuinely is that later on genuinely is prejudiced against orthodoxy which is an insane sentence to say, but it has found a new kind of bigotry, where every time a Russian character needs to do some plotting, they go to church, the choir is doing some church Slavonic kind of like, in the background, and they're like, you know candles there's incense there's all of this stuff they're in front of like an iconostasis um uh going like it is time to destroy the west i'm really glad you made that comparison to the muezzin actually devon because that's something i was gonna say is and i know that i've made later on because this happens again later it's

like it feels like this film took a lot of the the cinematic language of how films portray scary Muslims and just like change some of the set dressing. You're not wrong at fuck at all. It really does. Kenneth Branagh's character could 100% have been an Arab being played by Mark Strong. Could have been.

I'm not saying if that would be a better movie or not. I don't know if it would be a better movie but it is a movie we would watch we should go a little bit James Bond here because Jack Ryan goes to meet Cherovan in his like huge James Bond villain office and they trade some fucking like Bond

one liners yeah it's not very British that kind of thing it's Mickey Rourke in Stormbreaker where they just chat for the first time it's the bit in dr no it it's a classic scene i don't know i quite enjoy seeing it again i have some thoughts first of all about him getting into the office because brian like spends most of his time in moscow walking into lobbies when he walks into the gaudy hotel lobby i'm like wow that's a pretty

good gaudy hotel lobby when he walks into the office of the bank i'm like wow that's a pretty good gaudy hotel lobby and when he walks into turevan's office i'm like wow that's a pretty good gaudy hotel lobby when he walks into the office of the bank i'm like wow that's a pretty good gaudy hotel lobby and when he walks into turevan's office i'm like wow that's a pretty good gaudy hotel lobby it's like yeah like the sets are really good there's such an insane security setup as well for sheriff and industries for this facially a brokerage it's like they go through the security pods from the uh the bbc tv series spooks and also my gym uh i i refuse to answer whether or not i imagine myself as an mi5 agent when i go jogging um definitely i yeah i used to go to a gym that had these as well actually you think of yourself as an mi5 officer when you go jogging i like tap myself in, and in my head I'm like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So we get possibly the least earned cultural moment here,

which is Ryan sees a big portrait of Napoleon on the wall, and he goes, is that Napoleon? And Turevian goes, you know your history, Mr. Bond. This is the funniest shit in the world, because you don't see the painting until it's already been discussed those two lines so he goes like it's nice painting is that napoleon and it cuts back to like you can't see the painting yet and he's like i see you know your history it cuts to a third shot and this painting is like the entire third wall of the

office to be honest like to be honest it was kind of a gimme. He is wearing the Napoleon hat. Also, can we talk about how weird it is for this movie to make a Russian patriot idolize Napoleon? Napoleon Russia. They didn't get on, as far as I'm aware. No, not very well. I mean, I guess if you had gone like, is that Savoroff or whatever, then the hogs would not have understood. If they do that with Kathy later. Yeah. Also, Kenneth Branagh has a thing, right? And Kenneth Branagh's

thing, one of his things is... I mean, the main thing is that he's currently working. It's just like, Alice gets cut off and we just hear her flatly overdubbing it. Great acting. If Kenneth Branagh wants to convey smart guy, what he does is talk fast uh and he like clips his words a little bit it's the exact same diction as his poirot

and you can tell this because he does this here it's like uh i have like moved all of the funds i've sold all of the stuff there's nothing for you to investigate, fuck off thank you for your time, goodbye but he does all of that in the same diction as Poirot making a deduction when Kenneth Branagh is playing him except in a Russian accent what is also important to know is that he hasn't

at this point moved a single muscle on his face the entire time he's been on screen because he can't maintain the accent if his lips aren't held like that is what I figure this is also like this conversation of like

veiled threats, there's no veil in them like he's just like the first night can be deadly I am going to kill you the quality of the Bond 1 line is just a bit low the jet lag can be murder.

It can feel like a drowning man in bathtub. Isn't that like, oh, it was Piano Valley who came on the show to be very funny to have a James Bond one-liners, but he can't do metaphors. So he's just like, ah,

I wonder what your pussy's like we get basically really close to that in this movie but so so scrambling for a reason to like stay in moscow he's like uh ryan goes well let me let me like take you to dinner with uh this is his move man he doesn't know how to do any other move. He did this with Kathy several times as well. He's just like, what if we went to dinner? How about that? Yeah, when in doubt, ask him on a date. Yes, yes. Just panic and ask him on a date. That's a quick shot for Jack, right?

And Branagh knows and tells him that his wife, Kathy, is in Moscow. She has come to the hotel to try and surprise him. Kathy, is in Moscow. She has come to the hotel to try and surprise him. And so essentially what Kenneth Branagh is getting here is when the European couple on vacation ask you to swing and you're like, shit, maybe. And he agrees. This is their inn.

So he goes to meet Kevin Costner and he's like, look, could we send somebody into the office to hack Kenneth Branagh's computer to fuck his pussy whilst we're having dinner? And they're like, yeah, we could send you because that's what Jack Ryan

movies are. You'll still do it. And they go, we can use Kathy as a distraction because Kenneth Branagh really likes married women. He's a man after my own heart in that regard. Hey, who am I? Yeah, it's what, there's like 10 guys in the CIA. I don't know why they can't

spare a single motherfucker ever. True. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing about the CIA is it doesn't have a huge budget. Most of its budget is spent having guys just sort of walking around ready to hand off shit to you. This movie has... Yeah, training close-up magicians to pick pockets.

I really enjoy how many swift brush pass handoffs there are in this film no one has anything in their pockets every time they need something someone just happens to go by and hand it so we also have to see we also have to see where 9-11-2

is going to happen and we see this on screen Dearborn, Michigan which made every muscle in my body tense up. But, uh, no, not the angle you think, because you know who else is in Dearborn, Michigan, is Russians, in their spooky Orthodox churches. Yeah! And so we go to a spooky Orthodox church, where the choir is like, and a Russian family is like, we have been activated to do 9-11. Yeah, he starts reading from Lamentations, and they literally just go, we've been activated.

Yeah, that is the line as well. Yeah. There is also another spooky bald guy who is following them. He's an FBI agent, and they kill him. Yes, yeah. Yes. Back in Moscow, Kathy's there. it's nice that she's just like not on the phone she's now in the heart of the action in danger and she's found jack's

argue these days too uh this culminates in uh him telling her that she's in the cia that he's in the cia and her being like thank god which i like as a joke but like the the confection here is that you can't tell any of your like anyone you're dating that you're in the cia until you marry them and which is such a fucking stupid rule i believe it's like an outdated thing that's still in the books no surely not if you're readers if you're readers listeners if you're in the cia do do us but you can't unless you marry us which is the highest available Patreon tier yeah just propose to all of us

and then when we all say yes which we will then you can tell us about whether or not this is true so they go on this date and Ryan sort of plays up being a drunk and addicted to pills and a piece of shit uh it's good i like

this it's it's well acted and like acting drunker than you are is a great skill in human intelligence this is this is good this is good yeah yeah he he eventually gets himself like uh banished from the table as an excuse to like have sure even's id card brush past to him and another thing brush past to him so that he can infiltrate the office because now kathy has been left alone with kenneth browner it is it is yeah like it's very easy to make this tense and they do it quite well uh also the sort of of creepy seduction thing here is, it's well played in that they have identified a real type of Russian guy. There are a lot of Russian men in particular who kind of have a bit of an inferiority complex about their own high culture, and so anytime you show

any interest or know who fucking Anna Karenina was, they're like, holy shit, this is an international exchange of letters not seen since the days of Peace of the Great. It's a real thing. It's a real type of guy. This is a nice scene. It's a good chat between the two of them. These are two good actors both doing the best that they can

with the words that they've been told to say. Battle of the accents truly also it's fun that at this point Branagh gets to be like James Bond but in so doing he is setting himself up like he's literally he's doing all the lines like

I wonder how your pussy is but like he's actually fucking himself over yeah meanwhile his own pussy is but like he's actually fucking himself over meanwhile his own pussy is getting fucked yes yeah yeah so Jack infiltrates the office he has to do a little hacking minigame which is weird that they included

screen turns red that's how you know it's working yeah yeah yeah the sets off an alarm the security chief comes back so he's like on the clock I just wrote down yeah this is this this is tense enough um he he escapes just about uh what i what i do like is when um when kenneth brannan is told about this he immediately figures out who has been fucking his pussy and immediately figures out that kira knightley has been fucking his pussy and is like nice sick great hell yeah

Kevin Costner shoots a couple of guys to cover for Ryan which dumb but whatever Keira Knightley fucking your pussy what a day what an evening what I do like about the hacking minigame is he calls in a favor from the dude he

set up with like Rachel in accounting right at the start. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The motorbike guy. Just to remind you that he's around. Yeah, just to remind you that that guy's there. He comes back so many times throughout the course of this movie, just unnecessarily. So as American intelligence assets that are now blown, that now Kenneth Branagh's

like, oh, interesting, I will now kill you, they leave. And they don't go to the US Embassy, which is what you should do, they go to a warehouse where they try to figure out where 9-11-2 is gonna happen. And they all go to the same place, which is this warehouse. And of course, Kenneth Branagh's guys follow them there, break in, kidnap Keira Knightley. Because women love to be getting kidnapped. We love it. Can't get enough of it.

We also see that Branagh has killed his chief of security as punishment and stolen the light bulb out of his desk lamp. And at this point, Jack Ryan looks at the data that he's stolen and he looks at the calendar and he realises, oh my god, it's the 10th of September today. Yes. 9-11-2 is tomorrow. Yes. Yeah, he looks over a big

calendar and it just has 9-11-2 written on it and circled in red. He's like, oh fuck. 9am tomorrow morning, but we don't know where but somewhere in america and we we have to go and chase down uh my my kidnapped girlfriend this kind of feels like they're padding the movie for time yeah it does because they go and chase her and like get her back like in 10 minutes i'm like okay well this is the oh well we'll talk about this, because they use a special fucking gadget watch, which gives you a nice Hamilton Watch Company tie-in placement. She is captured by Kenneth Branagh with some of the least effective duct taping I've ever

seen in a movie. And then we get a genuine moment of sadism, right? So Kenneth Branagh calls him up, he does the accent, and doing the accent, he's like, hey, I'm going to put a lightbulb in Keira Knightley's mouth, because there's a pressure point on someone's neck that you can use to make them hold their mouth open. I don't know if that's true, by the way.

If you do know if that's true, DM me. I'm going to put a lightbulb in her mouth, and then when she bites down on it, it's going to fuck light bulb in her mouth and then when she bites down on it it's gonna like fuck up uh like all of her her mouth and her her throat and her lungs with broken glass and this is a genuinely new kind of sadism to me uh it's it's also i would say played explicitly as a sexual threat like you're putting a thing in a woman's mouth for one thing but second of all he like literally sniffs her hair. Also, listeners, don't put lightbulbs in your

mouth, because it's very, very easy to get them stuck there. That's not true, by the way. I looked into this. Don't think that I didn't go to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System and search for lightbulb-related accidents. The thing about getting a lightbulb stuck in your mouth is

a myth. Oh, shit. I'm gonna go bulb stuck in your mouth is a myth oh shit i'm gonna go put one in my mouth like later today well fuck me i guess uh if you're interested in being the third host of kill james bond uh also also i i can't find any examples of anyone like biting on a light bulb like by force like this however a lot of like between uh one and three hundred people uh a year in the u.s are apparently seen by hospitals for light bulb related injuries to the mouth i can't find a single death a lot of people who have like got lacerations to the entire mouth no one's died so this is perhaps not as effective as kenneth brown is making out to be still horrifying it's like pitch perfect like um brosnan era bond villain i think it's good well the thing is

right i'm i i think that this gets to something that it makes me very uncomfortable in the same way that i've been uncomfortable about since we did the foreigner and the torture scene and that which was worse because it was nominally perpetrated by the good guys right field expedient yeah yeah exactly i i think that it is considerably sicker to use this kind of sexualized torture threat in your movie as part of the ostensible, oh, we have to show how grim this world is, or how determined this villain is, that this is how far he's willing to go. I think it's genuinely repulsive to use it in that conceit, you know? Yeah. I have some-

I really don't like it, and it's like a feminist podcast, it's something that I'm not happy about us glossing over, I wanna talk about this, because it's really uncomfortable. Well, the mark of how bad the villain is is his willingness to hurt women. Yeah. Yes, yeah, absolutely. how bad the villain is is like his willingness to hurt women yeah yes yeah absolutely it's things like this or like i think sexual assault like depictions of sexual assault in media to show you how bad the villain is or always something that i find immensely distasteful 100 yeah and it's like there are movies about sexual assault and about torture that like have their sympathies with the victims this is not

one of those things this is one of those things where it is it is pornographic in a way that is deeper than any like actual pornography it is it it's the kind of same thing as as hostile it's the same thing as a lot of horror movies where it's like we're're inviting you, the viewer, to experience this vicariously and get a little shiver from how scary and how threatening and how gross this all is. And it makes me really fucking uncomfortable. Yeah, I suppose the idea that Keira Knightley might feel anything about, or the character, rather,

the idea that Kathy might feel anything about this incident or that it might have a of lasting psychological impact on her is kind of never really addressed. No, she's fine afterwards. Because she doesn't do a whole lot after this point in the film. Mm-hmm, no. This is sort of what she's around for. And to be clear, not to say that there's no way to depict it,

say, if it is, like, effective in something, like, you can do that. It's just, I would say, quite difficult. I would say very, very difficult. Yeah difficult it's also about the myths too it also raises the question of like what are you doing this for what are you doing this in aid of right like the the great sort of artistic purpose that you're doing this for is in order to slightly enhance jack ryan shadow recruits like would this movie be a towering achievement of cinema with this would it be a towering achievement of cinema with this? Would it be a towering achievement of cinema if you had cut this?

Yeah. Probably not. It's not exactly Sala, is it? It's not. No. It's not Kane, the fucking movie. It's Jack Ryan. When you think about it, a lot of shit that's in perfectly mainstream movies now makes Sala look tame. That's not an exaggeration.

You can go back and watch it, and it's ludicrous. It is funny now to watch it and be like, this is what was thought to be beyond transgressive at the time, and is now middling. It's mid. So, yeah, I think this speaks to the increasing sadism and misogyny of our culture. Certainly. Fair enough. It also contributes to myths as well, because most women who have lightbulbs put in our mouth, it's put there by someone who knows us. That is true.

You're very, very unlikely to be kidnapped by an evil Russian. Certainly by Kenneth Branagh. As far as I know, Kenneth Branagh has never kidnapped any women in real life, which means your odds of being kidnapped by him are vanishingly low. And yet this movie suggests otherwise. By all accounts, he's a nice man

this movie suggests but I mean to the point where the one named female character that's a yes that's no no that's not true Kenneth Branagh also has a secretary called like uh I want to say Natalia I want to say the finest

misogyny of the 1950s he also has a secretary i want to say natalia maybe so every russian secretary is called natalia that was a gimme that doesn't count ryan ryan rescues his wife but he leaves he leaves kenneth brannan alive um in any other women in this film the cia there's a cia assistant agent who doesn't happen yeah jemma chan's in the movie but like very briefly which is a massive waste of jemma chan at this point uh we now have to go to a plane where ryan is going to do all of his analysis and analysis is mostly a process where you yell at people because that's when they make their best decisions um and and he goes like tap bypass yes yeah who exactly is fucking our pussies who who is doing this and they work out what angle what duration bizarre line by the way

he took a cash advance of six thousand dollars then he went black and then that's that's that's yeah what about that the cia's child identifier which is weird that they just have on staff is like wait a second shiraven's dead kid isn't really dead he's been infiltrated into the united states to get revenge for the war in afghanistan that the soviets were in and we we then cut to this kid who is like is getting a van he steals a van from work and very briefly a kaufman star is born because he talks to a guy in the process of stealing this van and this guy delivers the following lines hey how, Al! What are you doing? You know some kind of shit?

The FBI was crawling all over here yesterday looking for you. He gets killed, and as he is killed, he is, like, pushed back on a dolly shot attached to his fucking baffling, but I love it so dearly. Like, nothing else like this happens in the movie. He stabs this guy, and then it looks like the Twilight baseball scene. He just like slides back and you're like what did what did that happen

kenneth brannett in in the director's chair like okay first set of lines you're gonna give me in marge simpson second set of lines you're gonna start whispering and you're gonna like hey you do this shit with the fbi and then third set third thing that happens're going to get on this dolly and we're going to stab you with a prop knife. Yeah, this guy briefly becomes the protagonist of the film because we experience the stabbing as he experiences it. It's like a sudden shock in which everything goes weird. But like, it's very odd.

It was an odd decision, but like, a good one. I kind of sat on the director's chair and just be like, get weirder. Make this weirder now. Yeah. Put him in a shopping car he's a creative filmmaker who's currently working that's right i literally like this shot i just don't understand so so alexander this guy he's he's kind of he's kind of a rip from the americans to be honest um he's doing all of this shit at the same time they're

analyzing kira knightley's just sat there reacting to stuff she's just thinking about her sort of light bulb trauma i guess there's a great shot where she gets kissed and like where jack just like kisses her offhand and her expression afterwards is really really weird like She's like, why'd you do that? Just like, what? Is that not in the script? Yeah. They work out that he... They check all of his social media, including, and I just got this with a drop,

and they figure out that he's got a van in Pennsylvania, which they raid. Somebody blows up Pennsylvania, Jack. Which is... The Philly PD blew up Pennsylvania, Jack. Which is- I thought that was funny. The Philly PD blew up part of Pennsylvania. Um, yeah, they raid the house, what's really funny, all the SWAT team gear looks like shit,

but they raid the house, the FBI guys in like, windbreakers with pistols going ahead of the SWAT guys, which is good. And they're too late, the guy, you know, he's dumped all of his stuff, he's cleared his- Reddit! And they're too late. The guy, you know, he's dumped all of his stuff, he's cleared his... And he's, like, driving to New York, as Keira Knightley figures out, to do 9-11-2 to Wall Street. Yeah, 9-11-2, Wall Street never sleeps.

Let him do it. Yeah. So they get off the plane, he kisses her, she's like, okay. She's getting a drop drop just her going okay yeah okay she literally is just like i'll be in this movie later and then like leaves yeah you're like all right see you later ryan ryan um ryan and uh fuck me right ryan and costner then go into a helicopter to fly to manh and Kevin Costner, just

like apropos of nothing, is like, hey, have you been in one of these since the time one of them destroyed your spine? Like, he genuinely, Ryan doesn't tense up or anything, Costner is the one who brings that up, he's like, hey, are you okay to do this right now, big dog? Could've just acted that, I think. Checking all your blokes. Could've just acted that, I think. Checking all your blokes. Could've just, yeah, for sure. But he gets over his fear of helicopters, they fly to Manhattan, they fly to Wall Street, and then we get the scene from The Dark Knight where they figure out that the Joker is disguised

as a cop, but slightly worse. The NYPD, of course, reacts to 9-11 too by sending every ESU truck that it has to Wall Street. A bunch of vans, and Ryan does some brain mind analysis and is like, wait a second, that van is disguised

as a police van, because you can see the paint coming off of it, because it's freshly painted. And we at this point get what I like to describe as some stupid bullshit. Yeah, we get a lot of stupid bullshit for the last little bit of this movie. Just some things occur. Jack Ryan again spots the fucking guy with the motorbike, and he's just like, give me that motorbike, and then it smash cuts to him driving the motorbike.

I'm like, good. I didn't need to see him do it anyway previous interest or knowledge in motorbikes fucking jason bourne legacy with jeremy ran yes yes um the whole time he's on the phone to kevin costner like he's playing us it's like napoleon at waterloo because napoleon at waterloo dug a big tunnel and put a bomb in an NYPD van. It's fucking our pussies just like Napoleon did. Everyone at the time was like really confused, that's also why Napoleon lost at Waterloo. He spent a lot of money on that NYPD van.

Just like Napoleon at Waterloo, it's fucked up and he's gonna lose, like... Yeah, the guard imperial getting like massacred Catford Brunner, and then in the middle of it there's one perfect Ford Econoline. Calling it Catford Brunner. How about that? Ah. Hey. Um.

Episodile. At this point I wrote down, even sillier bullshit. Guess what! Yeah. Yeah. So they drive underground, and they're like, where would be the best place underground to put a big bomb to destroy it? Where would fuck all of Manhattan's pussy if you put a bomb in it? There's a big convection chimney that'll fuck everyone's pussy.

The pussy chamber? Oh, fuck. It turns out Manhattan has a glowing weak spot that if you detonate a bomb makes it so the island sinks. Which really makes fucking uh the the makes al-qaeda look like 9-11-1 yeah um

9-11-1 was the first draft and then you get like a workout the kinks and like it gets out of previews 9-11-1 was was fucking mozart of terrorism this one this one is dire on a van underground nothing that's fucking 9-11 is a tough act to follow

they fight they both get wet the cops do nothing of course and then ultimately this leads to Jack Ryan stealing the van how did that happen I think I like looked away for two seconds and then no you didn't it genuinely is not shown he just steals the van

it's like seen missing literally all of every single cia agent repels down into this storm drain and then they're just like where the hell is fucking van and it cuts and jack ryan has got in the van and is like fucking i'll drive it into the river that'll do it it's like you could have yeah you remember that other batman movie you remember that uh because i'm going to do that. I'm going to drive it into the river. Wait, why are all the fucking references Napoleon?

This is clearly a Guy Fawkes thing. Yeah. So they have a fight in the moving van, which is somehow boring. Two guys fighting in a speeding van is like, eh, whatever. He ultimately escapes. Bomb, van, and Russian all go into the river, and

detonate directly next to the Brooklyn Bridge. Which is good. That's fine. Terrorism averted. There is, there's no way this doesn't, like, fuck up the bridge, right? Right? Plus, it's Manhattan, so like, probably a bunch of like, pipes and like, cables and tunnels and shit.

But nobody dies. I guess. Well, Alexander does. So at this point, we now have to get Kenneth Branagh killed. And this is something that I want to talk about. I think this was wrong. I shouldn't have done this. To reuse him. Well, the thing is, he's dying, right?

I would have let him die of the cirrhosis that we're told dying of. But the thing is, right, this is a thing that I want to talk about because every movie with a Russian bad guy in it now, going back to Some of All Fears, is like, okay, when they fuck up, they have to get taken out in a kind of Miller's Landing mob movie kind of way. And the implication is I think this is a way to cope with the idea that there is no way to punish Russian bad actors. The guys who did that nerve gas poisoning in Salisbury, they just went home. The guys who poisoned Litvinenko, one of them's in the Duma now. There is

no way for us to cause them to have any real consequences. But that's unacceptable to an audience. So instead, what you have to do real consequences but that's unacceptable to an audience so instead what you have to do the cope that you have to offer them is ah the the punishment for failure is worse than anything we could do which is flatly not true if these guys get rewarded but instead they get the miller's landing thing where uh the guy who he met in the first place literally has him killed in a drive-by in the woods yeah

they should have kept him alive it would have been would have been cool it would have been also interesting for jack ryan's character development to be like what do you mean i don't get justice we don't get a reward like the bad guy doesn't go to prison or anything it's like that's not how the cia makes sense for him becoming uh president later and developing the ryan doctrine but uh yeah so there he he makes up with his girlfriend, who I think agrees to marry him, I don't remember, because it's boring. Please don't make another one of these

movies. I know this is clearly intended to be like Ryan Origins, so they could do like Ryan 2. Yeah, and he gets to meet the president. Chris Pine has said that they're not planning to do another one, which... Thank God. They will have Sunday. The other thing... Oh, they will have not this cast which is good it's all i want to avoid the other thing is they meet the

president and uh ryan is like very excited and carsten's like he's very precise and concise and if he doesn't ask he doesn't want to know it's very clear that this is president obama however it is much funnier to imagine that they're talking to trump yeah that would be very funny god that would be so good trump just immediately leaks everything that he's told folks yeah and that's that's the movie great guy great guy i met him all the time, did great deals with him in Moscow, big fan of Napoleon, actually. Likes to fuck married women. I do too, but not as much.

Yeah, and that's Jack Ryan, shadow recruit. CIA clowns. I did not enjoy this movie. It particularly made me have a lot of thoughts about torture and about graphic sexual horror that i hope i've expressed well but i don't think i've expressed fully and i will probably come back to on the next movie that does something like this because every movie does something like this now interested to look into this um but we have a science-based

system on this podcast we we have a few things this couple things. First of all, we'll talk about what it says about masculinity. What? There is one last movie that we could conceivably put into this series. Without remorse. With Michael B. Jordan.

The origins of what's his name? John Clark. Making John Clark black is an interesting thing. I'm actually excited to see that. Because part of his deal as a character is that he is the slightly

more macho side of Tom Clancy's sort of like Maryland Catholic Irish id. So I'm interested to see that. They are in fact also making a movie of Without Remorse presently, but that's not going to be out for a bit, and we will deal with that when we have to deal with that. What do you reckon this film, in general, says about masculinity?

You think you've got it bad? Well, you've still got fucking legs, haven't you? Yeah, I think that's the main thrust right at the start. It's okay to ask one question about power. To be like, did you do torture? It wasn't my unit. Okay. You have to accept anything

you're told, though. You can ask any question. You can overcome disability with eye doctor pussy and willpower. It's okay to kill people as long as you feel bad about it? Mm-hmm. That's right, that's right.

Wall Street has made the United States terribly vulnerable, but not in any of the real ways that it has. The silences, silencing gun entirely. Yeah, they make it silent. There's no such thing as a suppressor that makes it silent. I think genuinely that it does have something to say about masculinity in that, like, Jack Ryan is convinced that he's an analyst. No, I can't do it, I can't that it does have something to say about masculinity and that like Jack Ryan is convinced that he's an analyst. No,

I can't do it. I can't do it. It's like, actually, you know, you, you are capable of the kind of manly things that you have to do, which is like killing people and,

and getting eye doctors. He leans in. He's, he's, he's, he's a boy boss. I really hate that word. Can we strike that from the record?

I think that's a really valuable and useful term, actually, because he does kind of find his masculine virtue throughout this film. It is a kind of coming-of-age man story. At the end, he's riding a motorbike and he's dating Keira Knightley. I mean, he was fucking Chris Pine and a Marine at the start, but whatever. Yeah. I just can't believe any of these things you cast a hollywood chris and anything and i just like yeah i simply don't believe he was an average

starting as an underdog that's why that's why i enjoyed harrison ford as him so much he had the right energy for it weirdly so did alec baldwin yeah um so so would have kevin costner who they wanted to cast instead of Alec Baldwin. He finally gets to be in a Jack Ryan movie, and it's his white James Earl Jones. We have a science-based rating system on this podcast called the SCUMM system, stands for Smarm Cultural Insensitivity, Unprovoked Violence, and Misogyny. So on a scale of one to seven, how smarmy do we think this movie is? I wanna give it a couple of points for the Bond one-liners in the office.

So they're fucking our pussies. It's pretty fucking smarmy. Yeah, I gotta be honest with you, it's pretty smarmy. I work the I do better than waterboarding every day is smarm central. I want to give it like a 4. I forgot that he said

every day. Cultural insensitivity. it's weird i i didn't we've invented a new kind of racism yeah um that is fascinating to me to use the the like cultural markers that have evolved to be racist to the middle east to just transpose them onto russia is a really interesting choice side note that the the soundtrack for this the the church slavonic choir for this um the title of that on the soundtrack is faith of our fathers which is again the kind of soundtrack title you would give to the sort of like cod muezzin stuff um and it's like yeah okay every russian is inherently tied to orthodoxy and orthodoxy is a thing that you use to like conspire against the west yeah

it's it's bad it's like a marker of like foreignness and untrustworthiness if you want to if you want to see a movie that gives russian orthodoxy a deserved kicking and also understands Putinism much better than this movie, I highly recommend the movie Leviathan, by the way. Yeah, no, you're not wrong. Bonus feature at some point, maybe? Possibly.

So how about a three or a four? I would say a three. Yeah, I'd say so. Unprovoked violence. Unprovoked violence. Oh, violence is fine if you're sad about it there isn't that much unprovoked violence I would say there's essentially none because they go out of their way

to show the one proper bit of violence they have him do as provoked yeah for sure I'd say it's pretty low I mean one if anything zero if it's possible I mean, one if anything. Zero if it's possible. I think it might be a zero, yeah.

Uh, okay. Okay for zero. And misogyny. I am cracking my knuckles. What do you reckon? Yeah, so Keira Knightley in this is not playing a character, she exists to- Yeah, it's woman. a character she exists to women exist to be fucked um kidnapped tortured uh all of which are sort of much of a muchness in the texture of this script so they were they're worried that you're cheating on them yeah it's a point as well that like none she never expresses any sort of opinions about the themes of the film which are are like, you know, arguably like patriotism

and like serving your country and stuff. These are all things that are for men to do. Women exist to be fucked. It's like, what is her fucking purpose in it? Like, what is her character's goal? She wants Jack Ryan. That's it. That's fully it.

There is a female CIA agent who has one line and gets to do a brush pass, and that's it. So it's progressive in the sense that women can also do brush passes. Yeah, maybe we should invent some kind of, like, super Bechdel test where it's like, do your female characters have anything to say or contribute to the themes of the film? Yeah.

In this case, no. In this case, the answer is no. No, absolutely not. Six? I would say six, yeah. That gives us a total score of... We can name that after ourselves, in fact. The KG Beck Delta.

That gives us a total score of 13, which is the same as the sum of all fears and yes it's the same as Jason Bourne yes it's the same movie it's only half of clear and present danger

it's less problematic than a queen's ransom well I mean especially now especially now I look back on some of the benefit of hindsight. I look back on some of the other Jack Ryan films that we've done, and I would say that this, with the possible exception of

Some of All Fears, which was a bit of a slog, this is maybe the least fun I've had. I mean, I look back on, like, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, although it was, like, ridiculous. We had all that stuff about, like, drugs, and, like, that was fun. I had fun watching those Air Force One was a laugh

this was just like yeah okay it's like a pretty serious film this was a drag and it made me unhappy to watch in particular it made me think about The Foreigner again which also made me unhappy to watch didn't have any sort of silly Irish accents in it like fucking

Patriot Games dude come on it did have some silly accents though impossible to note here on the record who buy though yeah could have been anybody yeah that's right so we uh our next our next mainline thing is going to be without remorse right um and then after that we're going to look very strongly into doing the man from uncle series however we also have bonus episodes but because of a special announcement because of everything being shit and expensive we want the podcast to also not be expensive we'd like it not to be shit we can't always promise that uh we try

our best in regards to that one but yes we can make it not expensive a program called the winter of content whereby uh over the winter while the cost of living is higher while you're gonna like use more energy which is more expensive because the russians are fucking our pussies financially um that you get the bonus episodes for free you can still pay us for them if you want we would like it very much if you do uh because the russians are fucking our pussies also but if you if you just want access to the episodes we will release them for free uh so the next bonus episode is abby's choice yeah i mean i knew that for the start we wanted to kick off the winter of content was a very very strong choice um a film that i'm sure will be very good it's i've never seen it before landmark just a great cinematic achievement it's

agent cody banks to destination london um which i've never seen but the reason i chose the listeners is because um it's very short and i don't know if you're aware but i am currently performing eight theater shows a week and sunday is the day that I have off, although it's actually a day for recording this podcast and doing press interviews. So I chose a film that we can watch quickly and not really have to think about. Holy shit. We can crank that one out.

No worries. And then, you know, by the time it gets back around to me and I'm ready to psychologically devastate all three of us again, you won't be working as hard. Looking forward to that. Really pumped about that one. Also, listeners, if you don't have tickets

to come and see The Prince, you should do that because it's good. Dev came to see it and they enjoyed it. I saw it very recently and it was an absolute fucking delight. I'll see it when it runs in New York. But in the meantime, thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Patreon if you for listening subscribe to the patreon if you want to if you can afford to if you don't check out some some free episodes

anyway uh one thing i will say is if if you have the money to spare i'm gonna link a few places you can throw the money that'll be more helpful to society than us in the in the description of this episode. But if you have spare money after that... Various food banks and stuff, yeah. Yeah, like the website for the Suffolk Playhouse where you can buy tickets for the Pritz. Oh my god.

I'm not putting that in. I'll put that in, but it's gonna go in a clearly delineated bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, this has been Kill J's Bond Jazz Outro Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond. This has been Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit,

a movie that seems like it was just sort of summoned up because they owned the IP and needed to do something to keep hold of it. Uh-huh. Made out the way of things. Tune in next week for Agent Cody Banks 2, regardless

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and our podcast art is by Maddy Lubchansky. Website is by Tom Allen. See ya. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова