Word: patrioteer
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...danger is missing. Genres that vitalized the box office a decade ago -- the sci-fi epic, the horror movie, the adult comedy -- look sapped. Top directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese remake their own or other people's movies. So does everybody else. Lethal Weapon 3 and Patriot Games and Sister Act may bring millions into a cool theater on a hot evening, but are audiences getting the fresh kick that good films are supposed to deliver? Movies today are like the Bush Administration in its fourth year: aimless, exhausted, myopic. They lack the vision thing...
...best, although perhaps not the only, reason to see Patriot Games, which is a sort of sequel to the successful adaptation of another Tom Clancy thriller, The Hunt for Red October. Ford replaced Alec Baldwin, who played sometime cia intelligence analyst Jack Ryan in the earlier movie, when Baldwin turned uppity. Some other characters are also carried over from the previous venture...
...October, based on a book written in late cold war days, Ryan was obliged to prevent nothing less than the accidental outbreak of nuclear holocaust. In Patriot Games his problem is less portentous, more personal: he faces a small rogue faction of the Irish Republican Army -- a bad lot, to be sure, but not exactly a threat to Civilization As We Know...
Overall, there is something abstract and distant about Patriot Games. But there are at least four exciting preliminary confrontations between the good folks and the bad ones, and a stormy-night conclusion in which all of the above are somewhat laboriously maneuvered into a large, dark house, a device that may be conventional but is nonetheless well managed. Along with the expert binding of Ford's performance, these are the juicy raisins -- Shall we say the raisons d'etre? -- in an otherwise blandish pudding...
CINEMA Harrison Ford enlivens Patriot Games, fortunately...