Michael B. Jordan lends his intensity and credibility to a film and a character that might not entirely deserve them in “Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse,” a macho, SEAL team, cloak-and-dagger outing from the late, best-selling author Tom Clancy (“Patriot Games”) and co-writer Taylor Sheridan (“Hell or High Water,” “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”). The 1993 Clancy novel “Without Remorse” is set in Baltimore and Vietnam. Its hero is former Navy SEAL Senior Chief John Kelly (soon to be Clark), now officially known as a character in the “Ryanverse” (i.e., the universe of Clancy’s best known character Jack Ryan). Kelly-Clark has been played before on the screen by Willem Dafoe in “Clear and Present Danger” (1994) and Liev Schreiber in “The Sum of all Fears” (2002).
“Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” has been transplanted to present day Washington, D.C., Syria and northwestern Russia (the film was shot in D.C. and Germany’s fabled Babelsberg Studios). In opening scenes, Kelly (now Jordan) and his team extract a hostage from war-ravaged Aleppo, killing several Russians in the process. In retaliation, Russians kill members of the team on American soil, and Kelly’s eight-month pregnant wife, Pam (Lauren London), is in the crossfire.
Kelly, already furious at CIA agent Ritter (a sneaky Jamie Bell) for withholding vital information, goes vigilante and kills two Russians in D.C. and lands in a prison full of Russian mafia. Soon, Kelly is part of a team headed by Lt. Commander Karen Greer (a no-nonsense Jodie Turner-Smith), and they are over the Barents Sea in a passenger plane on their way to Murmansk, Russia, to retrieve the assassin, who escaped Kelly’s home. Also in the bristling mix is Kelly supporter and DOD Secretary Clay (Guy Pearce).
Director Stefano Sollimo (“Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” TV’s “ZeroZeroZero”) keeps the action taut and the violence intense. He has shot some extremely daunting underwater sequences. But there is not much to be done about the predictability and weakness of the screenplay that blends extreme violence with sentimentality and canned military-espionage-movie-speak also attributed to video-game writer Will Staples.
Boston Herald
