Jack Ryan

Look, I don't give a damn what they've done, but the day that I sell out my countrymen will be the day that I put a bullet through my own head.

Um, you also chose, uh, uh, the, the, the first outing for the character of, uh, uh, Jack Ryan, played by Harrison Ford-

Yeah.

Yeah

Well, because when you apply a detail-oriented, almost literary lens to the gritty, militaristic world of Tom Clancy, you start to see things differently.

You start to realize that the best entries in this franchise, the ones that actually hold up, prioritize narrative heft and character mechanics over, you know, just mindless explosions.

Right.

It's not just about the big boom.

He is a massive deal.

Huge.

He is arguably the most popular supporting character in the entire Ryanverse.

Yeah, he has his own entire series of spin-off novels.

In this movie, fucking Harrison Ford just gets in the middle of some terrorism and he kills his terrorist brother, Sean Bean.

and then like the whole movie is just like sean bean can't let it go like dude like it was like it's like dude you fucked around and found out like come on man let it's it's a i'm sorry that your brother got killed but like it was gonna happen so it's just just ir it's not even the ira it's like this the splinter cell ira group is like they think they're training to go like kill like some royal or some shit and the whole time no they're really just training to go kill jack ryan

it's so fucking

stupid it's like it's like how hard is it really i mean how hard is it could it really be to kill jack ryan apparently really fucking hard yeah i mean he's out of the cia his wife's a doctor his daughter loses her spleen in a car crash

I love that that's the one that made you laugh the hardest as you're saying it.

I mean, because it's like, you know, what does a spleen do? You don't need your fucking spleen.

I mean, it really is.

It really is kind of dumb.

We have a massive cast here.

Sean Connery playing the Soviet submarine captain, Marko Ramius, and Alec Baldwin as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, plus Sam Neill, Larry Ferguson, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones

An embarrassment of riches, really

The narrative follows Ramius as he seemingly goes rogue, taking a state-of-the-art Soviet submarine toward the coastline of the United States.

His presence raises massive territorial concerns, prompting Jack Ryan to begin an investigation into Ramius' true motives before the military preemptively strikes

If we connect this to the bigger picture, these two films represent institutional paranoia in very different ways.

In No Way Out, the threat is domestic and internal, right? The Defense Secretary

No, it is the entire sprawling military industrial complex of two global superpowers, both poised for mutually assured destruction and completely blind to each other's intentions

which is a famous book about, for those who weren't around in the 80s and 90s, it's a book about a Soviet submarine captain who wants to defect to the West.

And CIA agent Jack Ryan has got to basically help him do it.

Have you guys ever read that? Frankie, it seems like it might be your type of book.

I've

where does it sit in like the Clancy Corpus? Like, is it one of his, was it his first big one or? Yeah, it

was what, it was what made him huge.

And it's the first Jack Ryan book, which eventually became movies with Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.

But when Jack Ryan's introduced right at the beginning of the novel and sort of classic, this book's from the eighties, but in classic 1950 style, he's, he tells his wife, I got to go.

When he's the analyst and he figures out Sean Connery wants to defect.

And, uh, Alec Baldwin is, is playing a young Jack Ryan, you know, a part that-

I remember this, sure.

Sure.