I've decided to write a few blog posts about political movies that I feel are of some quality and that deserve attention. Hopefully they'll prove interesting...we'll see how it goes.
It might seem odd that a Harrison Ford film based on a Tom Clancy novel would be one of the most significant political films of the past quarter century, but Clear And Present Danger is, indeed, all of these things. Its relationship to the Clancy films (Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Sum of All Fears) resembles nothing less than that of The Wire to the likes of CSI and Law & Order. What makes the film interesting (and likely successful) is that it contains all the traditional set-ups and payoffs of the other Clancy movies--someone looking for some awesome, militaristic action setpieces will be more than satisfied, up to and including a climactic chase/fight scene (that, regrettably, doesn't quite realize all its possibilities). Perhaps the most famous scene from the movie is the scene where Jack Ryan (Ford), the FBI Director and a lot of other bureaucrats are ambushed in a Colombian back alley, fired upon from rooftops by drug terrorists with rocket launchers. The whole thing is ingeniously staged and is genuinely thrilling--so much so that some films have stolen bits and pieces from the scene (or, in the case in Home of the Brave, they just stole every camera setup and staging detail outright). Also notable is a sequence following a missile headed toward a ground target, which serves as a reminder that, yes, one can film explosions without CGI technology, and the results are often superior.
What Danger does that the other Clancy films don't do is to integrate the Clancyish elements naturally into a film that takes on some weighty themes about American adventurism, intelligence fowlups, the imperial presidency and the abuse of the American military. The other Clancy films don't really bother to try to do this. Hunt for Red October was a well-made film, but it just avoided making political arguments. It might well have been the right thing for the film to do. Patriot Games and The Sum of all Fears are not generally regarded as good films, and the lack of anything beyond Clancyish action boilerplate is more a function of deeper problems with the films as conceived and executed. Patriot Games shared a director with Danger, Phillip Noyce, and it seems that after Noyce delivered a successful crowdpleaser he was able to get away with making a more impressive, weighty, and contemplative film. Clear And Present Danger is, indeed, all of those things.
Unlike some of the other Clancy films, Danger tells a fairly simple story, albeit one with numerous resonances in history and the present day. In essence, an unnamed president discovers that some personal friends were murdered by a drug kingpin. He orders his National Security Adviser (played by Harris Yulin, who does a great job of playing an old bureaucrat who's too tired to give a fuck) to send a message, but without saying to, of course. Yulin seeks out the CIA's operations director (an unctuous toady played brilliantly by Henry Czerny) and gets him to sign onto the deal. All of this goes on behind the back of Czerny's counterpart, the newly elevated Jack Ryan. Before long, there are boots on the ground, and airstrips and coke refineries are being levelled, but the cartel's response to these is vicious. It's at this point that Yulin takes a meeting with a drug intermediary that he basically hangs the troops out to dry, in exchange for some assistance on the drug war. Since they were secretly deployed, they're easily forgotten, except that Ryan figures it out and gums up the works.
Danger is hardly a perfect movie. The scene where Czerny is confronted by Ford should be incomparably awesome--let's just say that they are on the exact opposite ends of the idealism spectrum, but both are equipped with substantial charisma--but it kind of falls flat. Anyone saying "the world is gray" unironically just isn't going to be taken seriously. Additionally, the climax of the film simply drags, and it isn't quite as imaginative as the other setpieces. Perhaps Noyce just knew that the action crowd that he needed to make the film successful needed some plain vanilla action to end the film? Or maybe the inspiration just ran out? I don't know. But there's quite a bit to admire--by putting together a frighteningly real military scenario, Noyce looks at the forces that make these depressingly pervasive force projection experiments possible. Personal pique, plausible deniability, extreme secrecy, and ultimately unchecked power are what made the disastrous paramilitary drug war expansion possible, and the use of the CIA as a way of conducting foreign policy on the cheap is something that has a grand and robust history in America (see The Very Best Men or, better yet, Legacy of Ashes for many, many examples of this). The film, much like Clancy himself, comes from a perspective of old-right realism and skepticism of the military-industrial complex and a belief in democratic institutions, but the political orientation is almost irrelevant, as the movie tells it straight about foreign policy and truth knows no party or creed. It is sort of ironic that Clear and Present Danger--a very political and revelatory film--is something of a mainstay on TNT and such, though I suspect the trojan horse philosophy of getting in some thoughtful argumentation while satisfying the masses was Noyce's point all along, and it's well enough accomplished.
There's much else to admire in the film--Czerny's scene-stealing Washington weasel (seriously, this guy is a fave of mine--between this and the first Mission: Impossible film he might well have been a minor star--what ever happened to him?), who ultimately serves to indict the cynical Beltway elites who care only about accumulating their power, and then there's Donald Moffat's unglamorous but spot-on performance as a not particularly charismatic commander-in-chief (echoes of George H. W. Bush here). Willem Defoe seems to play more villains than heroes these days, but his performance here splits the difference--the movie does tend to put people into "good" and "evil" camps, but Defoe is always ambiguous. And the final scene between Ford and Moffat is fascinating and works quite well as a denouement--Ford plays the scene nicely, as a patriotic and decent man who respects the office of the president, but is nonetheless filled with rage at how he and so many others have been betrayed by him and his cronies. As are we all. Clear And Present Danger has aged quite well, and even thought the country has moved on to other issues it remains disturbingly prophetic and plausible. In fact, it might be even more relevant today than it was in 1994. One wonders if we'll ever get the message.
