Hmm - but Taghmaoui said Boyle had cast him.
Maybe the rumor was true according to which Hodge/Boyle did not a completely new script but a rewrite of the P&W script.
Or maybe denofgeek is as reliable as… well… an internet fan site that collects rumors.
At the end of the season, there’s a scene where I fully expected Greer to shout “My Man!” and fist bump Ryan.
Greatly looking forward to season 2 whenever that happens.
Watched with he same head on you’d watch starsky and hutch with, it’s good entertainment.
After the first three installments I must say that the writing is so much better than it is given credit.
Sure, familiar elements are in place, and the show does not strive to be edgy and groundbreaking - but I don’t need that desire to impress me with every series.
Also, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE how Ryan is not portrayed as a superhero. He is genuinely shaken by the violence he witnesses and has to take part in. What happens in the last 15 minutes of episode 3 really shocked me, too - wouldn’t have thought that this show would dare to do this.
Krasinski is awesome here as well and, for me, the biggest selling point of this show.
But isnt that true of all the screens incarnations of this character; the biggest Ryan trope being: “But I’m just an analyst!”
Yes, it´s part of the character. But these days, to keep that, is for me a cause to celebrate.
This is something I also always loved about Bond: he is not one of those slap-happy muscle men, he actually dislikes violence and only enforces it if absolutely necessary.
I also hope that the next actor to portray Bond will not buff up like Craig and feature just an athletic build. Bond does not show off and won’t have the time to go to the gym twice a day, eating and drinking only on a very strict diet.
Adrian Brody demonstrated very well in Predators that being wiry doesn’t mean the character can’t convince us that he’s deadly.
Or Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr, and Jason Statham showing you don’t have to be tall.
Or indeed any actor who hasn’t actually killed someone in real life, like…
So we’ve narrowed Bond 7 down to short, skinny, balding actors who can prove they haven’t killed anyone.
I think we’re on to something - make it so!
Ben Mendelsohn it is. Though are we ready for a second austrailian to take a crack at it?
After only 50 years???
I think 50 years is the mark. Now let me go top up my brandy and clean my monocle…
It was about being convincing enough as a killer or badass, rather than demonstrating that they could actually kill in real life…
Just an argument for why Bond doesn’t need to be an Arnie or Craig type. In fact it’s kinda silly for him to be.
It’s much more effective and thrilling when an actor who isn’t muscular suddenly springs into action and uses his combat training; fast, direct, dirty and deadly.
The fassbinder fight in sodenberg’s action movie Heywire is the kind of fisticuffs I’d like to see with Bond 7. Btw, not recommending that movie - pretty dull apart from that great scene.
Imo the best fight scene in the Bond canon is Connery v Shaw in FRWL. It helps that the tension has been so ramped up over their dinner together, but what really makes it work is the absense of the old school big swinging punches of cinema of the times. Perhaps that’s a function of the fight being in a tight space, but that leads to a desperate and dirty conflict to survive; you really feel it.
The final fight between Brossa and Bean had a sense of this training and desperation and works a treat (no doubt down in large part to the great Martin Campbell). Same can be said the the stairwell fight in CR. Its desperate brutality gives the following shower scene the weight it needs. That sequence - fight and aftermath - is my favourite part of that movie.
Craig pulls it off because he’s a very good actor, but next time I’d prefer lithe and lethal rather than the burly bashing.
Couldn’t agree more - perfectly said!
I got the DVD and started some of the first episode. Just wonder what have they and have not changed about Jack Ryan and James Greer. Also what other character are in the series and not in at all.
All I know from reading the novels is this:
Jack Ryan has a PHD in History and Bachelor in Econ. He was also a marine and worked in the investment business, that was after the chopper accident as a Marine. He got his PHD at Georgetown. He taught at the United States Naval Academy. He met his wife Caroline, nicknamed Cathy way before started working for the CIA in Patriot Games. There nothing about him liking rowing at all.
James Greer his Ryan’s boss, mentor and father like person. He is a Navy Admiral, and the one who brought Ryan and Clack to work in the CIA. Greer want to groom Ryan for bigger things in the intelligence business and National Security He is the head of the CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence.
Both Greer and Ryan has NOTHING to do with CTC at all.
You’re right, the Amazon Jack Ryan is a very different animal from the Clancy novels. Those were firmly set in 80s Cold War country and followed topics and events from 30 - 40 years ago. Don’t expect this in Amazon‘s series.
What Amazon did was use that basic premise of a former Marine turned academic who ended up with the agency as analyst. He’s been slightly updated, cycling to work and rowing in his spare time. Both activities which are much lower profile than for example martial arts or shooting hell out of cardboard targets might be for a CIA intelligence officer.
Greer is depicted as professional CIA field officer, nowhere near the rank of admiral. He initially isn’t terribly hot on Ryan‘s expertise but learns to respect and use it during the show. The function of ‘mentor’ is possibly given to the character Timothy Hutton plays; somebody much closer to politics and in-house machinations.
Have to confess this series actually interested me enough to watch it within a single week, even though I’m no Clancy fan. Those - especially the hardcore fans - will probably be disappointed by not getting the whole run of books adapted for the series.
It would have been interesting to take the route Amazon took with the “Bosch” series - 1 book = 1 TV season.
But yeah, just as James Bond can’t have served in WWII and be set in the present day, Jack Ryan needed a bit of updating…
This show is pretty bad really; it is very watchable but not all that good. It’s weirdly old fashioned in a slightly morally dodgy way (America are heroic world police who solve problems with guns -Jack even uses one to open a door in the last episode); plus is written not intelligently enough, which is a problem when you have a supposed genius as the main character- he ends up just figuring out really obvious stuff whilst the others just stand around gauping. The storyline isn’t complex enough to justify eight episodes: other series this length really take you on a journey, but here we have the same bad guy at the end that we started with- and that’s all it is: a bog standard ‘stop the brown terrorist’ plot. Something like Clear and Present Danger had a way more interesting plot: they could do worse than literally take some pages from Tom Clancy.
And yeah: Krasinski. He’s an odd one. Very charismatic and watchable (despite apparently only having one facial expression: blank with his eyebrows hovering over above his head somewhere), but stuck with a character who’s simply too perfect in every way and very cliched.
And yet, weirdly, I happily watched it all. It’s mindless spy pap, and sometimes I want that! 