Tom Clancy's Without Remorse

 2021, d. Stefano Sollima - AmazonPrime

I'm not a Tom Clancy guy, in that I'm not of that generation.  Bluntly, Tom Clancy is for Boomers.  It's for a generation for whom America is still undeniably the good guy and anyone whom they choose as the enemy is the bad guy.  Clancy's works have always seemed so jingoistic they've make me uncomfortable (not that I've partaken in much of them) but taking a novel released in 1993 set during the Vietnam War and recontextualizing it to a modern setting seems egregiously tone deaf.  

Without Remorse race bends the lead John Kelly to be Michael B. Jordan (hey, turning any character into Michael B. Jordan is going to be an improvement, so it's not a complaint), and yet despite the progressive casting, it still seems to be playing directly to a MAGA-loving crowd laden with conspiracy theorists, anti-government militias, armchair vigilantes, and, yeah, more than a hint of misogyny.  

Seriously.  It's unbelievable that in 2021 they're still making movies where fridgeing a character's wife is the motivation for a character to become, effectively, a super hero.  But it happens here.

Quickly, because there's really not much to the plot here, Kelly was part of a rescue mission in Sirya where they took out, unexpectedly, a whole bunch of Russians in the process.  Some time later, back in America, members of the team are being killed, seemingly by Russians.  Kelly is targeted too, his pregnant wife is killed, and he's hospitalized for some time.  Upon recovering he goes back into service with a team to track down his assailant who turns out to be Brett Gelman (Stranger Things, Fleabag), totally not a Russian.  Yep, they're being set up to start a war because wars create jobs and stimulate the economy.  Yeah, that's about it.

It's a threadbare conspiracy plot, the "twist" you can see coming a mile off (Clancy has never been accused of being complicated, which is probably why his fans like him so much).  The action looks expensive and is possibly good, but the film is so dark and muddy it's really hard to see what's really happening (even with the lights off).  Perhaps in a dark theatre it would work better, but filmmakers...suck it up, films need to be able to play at home now.

One big action set piece takes place in Russia and there's a very casual sense that the terrorist act that John Kelly is perpetrating there is a-OK because, well, he's the good guy...and if he gets captures, dammit, it's war.  But it doesn't feel good at all, and though Kelly as our protagonist has a desperate sense of getting out alive, there's also no sense that he's not trying to kill many, many Russians.  Rah, rah, 'merica (wait, do the MAGAsses like Russia now because Trump does, or do they still hate it after decades of anti-Russian propaganda?)  This film truly carries itself with the sense that "We're Americans, we can do what we want, wherever we want, because...we're Americans."

I love Michael B. Jordan, but I genuinely dislike this movie.  But I didn't dislike it while watching it, I only started disliking it once I started unpacking it.  But that's the insidious nature of films like this... they seem toothless and give you a "rah rah" charge, but underneath there's something unseemly about it all that it refuses to address.  It's there if you think about it, but people who like this stuff tend not to think about it.

 It's an outdated story with no grounding in modern global (or even American) politics.  Because Clancy's biggest fans are likely right-wingers, this film can't go hard at them at all (even though true Republicans should be exceptionally disgusted with the trajectory of their party the past decade, and don't seem to understand they're the biggest threat to America), but there's no attempt here to even try to understand complex geopolitics, nor does it even seem to want to touch upon where twisted American ideologies come from, it just falls back on the "few bad apples within our own ranks does not define us" excuse.  The fact that those "few bad apples" seem to keep bobbing up to the surface implies there's a fundamental problem, neighbour.  That problem, I don't think the inevitable Rainbow Six film(s) will address.  I expect more militaristic bullying in foreign nations.