‘Jack Ryan’ series gets an update

By Jake Coyle

AP Film Writer

Having clung to the Russians as go-to villains long after the Cold War thawed, the movies find themselves current again with their favorite arch-enemy.

Cooling Russo-American relations have yielded an opening for the return of Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst, just in time for the Sochi Olympics. In the Jack Ryan reboot, “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” Chris Pine takes over as the spy who was played by Alec Baldwin (“The Hunt for Red October”), Harrison Ford (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger”) and Ben Affleck (“The Sum of All Fears”).

Ryan is a navigator of murky, reasonably realistic, international espionage worlds. He has neither James Bond’s preternatural suavity nor Jason Bourne’s visceral butt-kicking skills, but instead anxiously finds his way with patriotic cunning.

“Shadow Recruit” tells a new backstory for Ryan. Inspired by Sept. 11, he joins the Marines and is heroically injured in Afghanistan. During his recovery, he meets his eventual fiancee (a doctor named Cathy, played by Keira Knightley) and is lured to the CIA by a mysterious recruiter (Kevin Costner, unconvincingly trying to exude a Donald Sutherland-like gravitas).

He’s covertly embedded at a Wall Street bank where he uncovers a Russian plot to buy up U.S. Treasury bonds, which he suspects will be sold off in a coordinated act of terrorism and currency devaluation.

Ryan’s investigation leads him to the Russian oligarch Viktor Cherevin, played by Kenneth Branagh, who also directed the film.

Branagh endows his film with (mostly) old-fashioned competency but little to distinguish it from superior thrillers that have come before. The best thing here is the sleekness of modern Moscow, where much of the action takes place. But “Shadow Recruit” is also disappointingly formulaic, relying on the familiar set-piece-driven story of an implausible heist and a time-bomb finale.

“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and intense action, and brief language.” Running time: 1:45 minutes. Grade: C