Directed by Stefano Sollima
Written by Taylor Sheridan & Will Staples
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, and Guy PearceMPAA rating: R for violence
Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes 
Streaming on Amazon Prime starting April 30

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

As someone who has spent the better part of the last decade in the book business–first in a used book shop and then as a librarian–I am well acquainted with Tom Clancy. I am also well acquainted with his audience, which is almost entirely composed of white Republican male boomers. They’re the trashy sort of man’s man books that, admittedly, make for pretty damn fun movies. His Jack Ryan books were adapted into wildly popular series of films starring Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford–The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger–and based on how much my parents, and the parents of pretty much everyone I know had those VHS tapes at their house, it’s curious to wonder if his brand of conservative espionage thriller can be adapted to appeal to a younger audience.

Enter Michael B. Jordan and Taylor Sheridan. Jordan is about as hot as you can get as a young actor–both as a tremendous talent, and, well, they shoehorn a scene into this movie where he takes his shirt off and gets to display his absolute jackedness--and his presence clicks off at least a few of the alarm bells that go off when you see the words TOM CLANCY’s… preceding a book/movie/video game title. Taylor Sheridan is also on a hell of a run as a screenwriter, earning raves for his taut and gritty scripts for Hell or High Water, Sicario, and Wind River. His co-screenwriting credit clicks off a few more of those aforementioned alarm bells. So why oh why is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse absolute hot garbage? The answer is in the movie’s title. 

Let’s get this out of the way: I didn’t expect this to be the Citizen Kane of espionage thrillers. I expected this to be a dumb and fun action movie in the vein of the recent Chris Hemsworth vehicle Extraction. Give me a charismatic lead, some kickass action scenes, and let me enjoy my life. The problem here is that Sheridan and his co-writer Will Staples have taken a book from 1993 and made a movie that feels like it is set in 1993. It’s stilted, stuffy, and feels like a modern Call of Duty game but with an even dumber story. I suppose that’s what happens when one of your writers is an ascending talent and the other one’s only credits are video games (Will Staples has penned such interactive classics as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Need for Speed Rivals) and random episodes of bad TV shows. The script is absolutely embarrassing, and it provides the rotten foundation this machismo fueled house of cards is built upon. 

Michael B. Jordan plays Navy Seal John Kelly, whose pregnant wife is gunned down in their home by Russian nationals as revenge for Kelly and his crew annihilating a Russian arms depot in Syria in the film’s plodding opening action sequence. From the get go this movie feels like chugging a bottle of those testosterone pills they advertise in the middle of the night on cable news networks. It’s the sort of filmmaking that makes you wonder why they just didn’t call it Tom Clancy’s GENERIC ACTION FILM. Any hope that the involvement of Jordan and Sherdian might give Clancy’s brand of pulp some edge is quickly erased.

What’s worse is that when reading the synopsis of Clancy’s 1993 source material, I found out it doesn’t even have the same plot! Some beats, sure, but it’s a different story, which makes you wonder why, when they could have done anything else, the screenwriters went with an absolute nothingburger of a plot. The revenge narrative is so cliched, the dialogue is straight up embarrassing (“I’ll show’em what a pawn can do to a king,” a brutal line that gets a callback when it turns out that the guy he thought was a king wasn’t a king but, get this, a pawn just like him!), and the whole “who is REALLY behind this conspiracy?!?” gimmick feels copy and pasted from How to Write a Shitty Action Movie For Dummies. The second a certain someone enters the picture, you know he is the real bad guy. It’s that kind of movie. It telegraphs this so hard that if you don’t get it right away, you will the second you realize what kind of movie you are watching. It’s insulting on every level, and it’s miraculous that god knows how many people laid eyes on this script and said, “this is fine.” 

While Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is irredeemably bad and you shouldn’t watch it, I do feel like it is necessary to put Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim) on your radar if she wasn’t there already. She plays Kelly’s right hand woman in a part that was obviously meant to be a dude. This movie is full of so much straight male energy that her presence feels downright baffling, because her presence is absolutely magnetic and feels totally out of sync with everything else in this movie. Turner-Smith was certainly cast to balance out the testosterone, and while her character is as one-dimensional as every other character, at least you come away with that, “Can I please have that actor in all my movies from here on out” feeling. Otherwise the only other takeaway--other than resting assured that Michael B. Jordan will be fine and it’s OK for him to have some duds after such an incredible run--is that there is no need to live in the shadow of old white dudes like Tom Clancy and there is no sense in adapting this garbage in the 21st century. Leave it in the 90s where it belongs.