Amazon Prime Video is Ruining Tom Clancy’s Stories

Warning this article contains spoilers for some of the plot points of Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse and Jack Ryan.

Since debuting on Amazon’s Prime Video service on April 30, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse has earned a score of 5.8 on IMDB, and an audience rating of 43 percent on Rotten Tomatoes—hardly stellar scores for such a high profile release.

That suggests there was quite a bit of remorse among viewers, and one audience review posted on Rotten Tomatoes may have summed up the made-for-TV movie particularly well, “As formulaic as it is implausible, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse delivers the bare minimum as an action thriller—and will leave Clancy fans particularly disappointed.”

What actually further adds to the disappointment is that a film adaption of Tom Clancy’s 1993 novel, which served as an “origin” story for the character of former Navy SEAL John Clark (nee Kelly), has been a long time in coming. What finally arrived was a significant misfire.

Finding the Right John Clark

Part of the problem is that Michael B. Jordan, who may have proven himself as an action star in the Marvel superhero film Black Panther and more than held his own in the Rocky Balboa series, is simply miscast as a hardened military veteran turned CIA operative. Some fans have expressed frustration at an attempt to add diversity to the franchise by casting an African American in the role, which was never needed as the books and prior films already had no shortage of diversity with African Americans, Latinos, and women in significant roles.

Michael B. Jordan in Tom Clancy's Without Remorse
While neither Willem DaFoe nor Liev Schrieber may have been the “perfect” John Kelly/Clark, both were far more believable than Michael B. Jordan in Amazon Prime Video’s original Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. While Jordan pulled off playing Apollo Creed’s son, this guy doesn’t seem like a special operations warfighter. (Photo: IMFDB))

However, the bigger issue is that Jordan doesn’t come off as a hardened veteran, pulled back into a life he tried to leave behind. This is notable in that in Clark’s original Vietnam War background from the Tom Clancy “Ryanverse” series was updated to the Global War on Terror. Yet, instead of actually having the character developed through multiple stories—as happened in the books—the plot rushes to the finish line with plot twists that defy logic or reason.

John Kelly never has a chance to settle into a post-military life. Instead, it is one action sequence after another with little payoff along the way.

Michael B. Jordan in Tom Clancy's Without Remorse
By setting Without Remorse in the modern day it loses some of its mystique of a veteran warfighter who was pulled back into the violent world he tried to leave behind. (Photo: IMFDB)

A Complex Character

Without Remorse offers almost no depth into John Kelly, other than his character suggests he is ready to retire from the military and then is suddenly dragged back in, and by the end of a single mission, Clark becomes the battle-hardened John Clark, setting up for the sequel Rainbow Six.

Jordan is actually just the latest actor to step into the role, and he had big shoes to fill, while some others opted not to even try to take it on. In fact, in 1994, Keanu Reeves was offered the role—and that was long before his Matrix or John Wick days. More recently Tom Hardy also passed on the role, and neither should have any remorse for their decision given the direction this story took.

Even those who have played Clark hadn’t really connected with fans.

Willem Dafoe played Clark not as a war hero but more as a cynical and opportunistic mercenary in Clear and Present Danger (1994); while Liev Schrieber took on the character as a more sardonic warfighter in 2002’s The Sum of All Fears. Neither was really the veteran soldier turned CIA field operative, but each at least conveyed that they had worked in the world of covert ops for years or even decades.

Willem DeFoe in Clear and Present Danger
Willem DaFoe played John Clark as a self-serving mercenary in Clear and Present Danger but he was still a better choice than the others (Photo: IMFDB)
The Sum of All Fears
It is hard to see Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan in The Sum Of All Fears, which made Liev Schrieber a more believable John Clark (Photo: IMFDB)

Bad Adaptation

The bigger issue goes far beyond this particular film. Clearly, Amazon is interested in capturing the appeal of the Ryanverse, especially as books continue to come out twice annually even after Clancy’s death. The world of Jack Ryan, John Clark, and others has expanded but Amazon takes almost nothing from the plethora of source material.

About the only thing in common with any of Amazon’s efforts at this point are the character’s names and their connection to the CIA.

John Krasinski in Jack Ryan
John Krasinski showed he could play a special operations warfighter in the 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, but that is part of the problem with his starring in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, who is an analyst and history professor not a combat leader. (Photo: IMFDB)

This isn’t new to adaptations of course.

A common complaint among fans of Ian Fleming’s books is that the James Bond films often had little in common with the source material apart from the title. A similar complaint has been made of the Mission Impossible film franchise, which at this point shares only a title with the iconic TV series. Perhaps in that regard, Amazon is looking to go with name recognition alone.

That may have worked for HBO with Game of Thrones, which actually brought fans to the books more than the other way around, but Clancy already has a large following—one that hasn’t always liked the adaptations even as the past films had actually strived to stay true to the source material.

Amazon should have also noted that when the changes were so great, even Tom Clancy distanced himself. That was notable with 1992’s Patriot Games, the second of the Jack Ryan films and the first to star Harrison Ford. Clancy was unhappy with the script and during production asked to have his name taken off of the film.

Given that fact, one can only wonder how Clancy—who passed away in 2013—would have felt about the changes made to Without Remorse. Instead of sadistic drug dealers who killed the former prostitute girlfriend of Navy veteran John Clark (nee Kelly), the film involves Russian agents working at the behest of a Secretary of Defense who seeks to reignite the Cold War.

The issue here is that the United States is already inching closer to—if not already in—a nouveau Cold War with Russia and China, and doesn’t need any pushing!

Likewise, where Clancy’s novels are geopolitical thrillers that featured brief moments of action, the film comes off like a second-tier video game with nearly nonstop action. Viewers also need to ratchet up the usual “suspension of disbelief” required to enjoy a movie to the full extreme, and look past some moments of utter stupidly—how does a commercial airliner get shot down and the characters manage to retrieve their gear and take a short boat ride to Russia? That sort of action might work in a Call of Duty game but seems downright lazy in this film, and actually pointless. It never increased the danger for the characters and they still end up exactly where they intended to be!

Amazon and Clancy

About the best part of Without Remorse is that it actually makes Amazon Prime Video’s original series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan seem not so bad in comparison. While the first season of the series had promise as John Krasinski played a United States Marine Corps veteran turned CIA analyst Jack Ryan, who becomes thrust into the world of international espionage.

By the second season many of the traditional Clancy elements, including interweaving plots and extensive use of secondary characters, disappeared along with the domestic life of Ryan in the United States. Gone is Dr. Cathy Mueller, who in the books goes on to be Cathy Ryan and serves as a point of normality for the CIA analyst.

Instead, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan became an action-packed show that seemed like a knockoff of Cinemax’s Strike Back, where the heroes are always safe despite facing ridiculous odds in exotic locations. The series unwisely transformed Ryan from a CIA analyst/desk jockey, who all too often finds himself in the crosshairs of the baddies, to a special operations warfighter more than ready to charge into action—including flying in a helicopter to assault the capitol of Venezuela.

All of this begs the question as why Amazon sought to bring Tom Clancy’s work to the streaming platform without remaining the least bit faithful to the books? In “rebooting” the franchise, the streaming service missed a golden opportunity to bring the current stories of Jack Ryan Jr., which have continued with other authors since Clancy’s passing. These books still feature the usual “ripped from the headlines” plots that made Clancy so popular with fans.

Instead we’re left with the guy who played Apollo Creed’s son as a Navy Seal and the prankster from The Office as Jack Ryan. That’s a plot twist that Clancy likely never saw coming, and certainly wouldn’t have approved of.

Jack Ryan
Jack Ryan may have wielded a gun quite a bit in the book series, but Tom Clancy’s character wasn’t the scruffy warfighter as seen in Amazon’s Jack Ryan original series. (Photo: IMFDB)

The greatest threat to Ryan, Clark, and the even Clancy’s legacy might just be Amazon.com.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based freelance writer who regularly covers firearms related topics and military history. As a reporter, his work has appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers, and websites. Among those are The National Interest, Forbes, and many others. He has collected military small arms and military helmets most of his life, and just recently navigated his first NFA transfer to buy his first machine gun. He is co-author of the book A Gallery of Military Headdress, which was published in February 2019. It is his third book on the topic of military hats and helmets.

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18 thoughts on “Amazon Prime Video is Ruining Tom Clancy’s Stories

  1. Couldn’t agree more about the contrast between seasons 1 & 2 of Jack Ryan. The first season had some real plot complexity, and the main character was at least somewhat believable (well, in a Hollywood way) as an analyst that gets sucked into bigger events. But the second season was ridiculous as he was somehow transformed into a full-on spec ops operator. I really hope they reign it in and get back to the roots of the Ryan series for season 3.

    I read so many bad things about Without Remorse that I haven’t bothered to watch it.

  2. Agreed. You like Clancy, or you don’t. If you do, you don’t want to see characters you admired in his books changed, certainly not for political expediency.

    I tried watching the Ryan series, but couldn’t take it. This movie, was ok for a Prime movie, I guess, but it wasn’t Clancy.

  3. Clancy was an odd duck and was a mixed bag as an author. His dialog was usually wooden and character development laughable; his characters were leaden stereotypes with no real personality. However his writing of action scenes was frequently breathtaking and his grasp of technical matters was incredible. His serious shortcomings as a writer make it hard to cast his films. It’s hard to breath life into characters that were written as wooden statues.Kaw-Liga!😂

    1. Thanks for adding nothing to the discussion besides a pointless and badly written critique of a successful author.

  4. I couldn’t agree more. Jack Ryan and John Clark aren’t even recognizable as the same characters from John Clancy’s book. Jack Ryan and John Clark were characters we Clancy fans grew to admire and love. What Amazon has done to them is regrettable as far as this viewer is concerned.

  5. There are few black Special Forces soldiers. Jordan looks and acts like a Rich boy who has never done anything but be HANDED a career because of his last name and his race. Amazon is an SJW WOKE POS streaming service and I would NEVER pay for it. But Soyboy Woke turds think because you put on camouflage and hold an AR that suddenly you are are badasss.

    1. My biggest frustration with this film is that they wasted time creating it instead of season three of Jack Ryan.

    1. Amazon’s failure with “Without Remorse” was a self-inflicted injury, an unforced error. I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw a black Lesbian team leader. AS IF….

      If this movie ever makes it to commercial TV, I suppose that every commercial will involve bi-racial couples.

  6. Funny, I literally just finished watching this film out of boredom. My initial thought was, why does this character seem like he just got jumped out of a gang? There was nothing likable about him. Granted, casting someone else wouldn’t have made this movie any better.

    1. That’s funny and a big part of my complaint is the writing and casting. He sounded like Eric Kilmonger trying to speak a foreign language with minimal practice when he attempted to use military jargon (kind of like Wil Smith, to a slightly lesser extent, in Gemini Man.). It was like watching Daryl Hannah try to be an astrophysicist in Roxanne. I never read the book and can only rate it as a stand-alone movie and…Ouch!

  7. I didn’t hate the first season, but as soon as I read that the socialists at Amazon had ret-conned Venezuela to make the socialists the good guys and fabricated some nonsensical populist- fascist regime as the “bad guys”, I was done with it. What trash.

  8. I watched about a half hour of this woke garbage then turned it off. I couldn’t care less what race the main character was. This was forced, in your face, and topped off with a black lesbian seal commander. WTF?

  9. A black woman with a special warfare Trident on her chest, nope totally impossible. There has never been a female Seal to date let alone be a Seal team leader. The movie is a total woke turd of impossibilities of wishful liberal correctness.

  10. This type of thing always strikes me as a sleazy way of capitalizing on established success as a marketing gimmick to create interest in a virtually unrelated (and sub-par) storyline and plot.

    This “adaptation” only had the most tenuous relationship with the original novel and was essentially a completely different story. So why package it as based on Clancy’s novel? Why not give the characters different names, make up your own title and market it as a fresh product?

    Because they know it was a substandard plot, poor (woke) casting, unoriginal, formulaic and ploddingly predictable. Had it had an original title with no “based on” gimmickry, it would have never gotten out of the gate. Many people (myself included) watched it (and were sorely disappointed) because it was supposedly a Tom Clancy adaptation. Once the word got out about how bad it was, that stream of viewers dried up quickly.

    Today’s hollywood is seemingly incapable of producing interesting, creative, absorbing entertainment any more. Everything is preachy, predictable and rote. I could write for hollywood these days:

    -Big exciting opening where the multi-ethnic cast introduces themselves with lots of explosions and physically impossible feats.
    -Love scene establishing that the tough hero is a softie at heart.
    -Chase scene that’s too long and involves more feats that defy the laws of physics.
    -Preachy scene about how we’re all destroying the earth and extolling the virtues of the left’s favorite indulgences like electric cars, windmills and solar panels.
    -Fight scene where a petite heroine handily defeats several male opponents who are twice her size without even breaking a sweat.
    -Scene where the petite heroine comes out as gay and engages in a gratuitous graphic sex scene with her “partner”.
    -Final scene where the sublimely diverse cast uniformly condemns civilian gun ownership and the entire concept of defending oneself while simultaneously shooting all the bad guys…preferably with machine guns, rocket launchers and grenades…and saving the world.
    Fade to black.

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