Patriot Games (1992)

OK thriller

It's an OK thriller with a good cast. Harrison Ford is OK, the woman who plays his wife is good, and we have James Earl Jones as the Big Cheese from the CIA, also the villain is Sean Bean, and his female sidekick is very beautiful.

The story is OK, a bit far-fetched stuff about a sort of "continuity IRA" group which is determined to go on with the fighting, and our hero Jack Ryan who manages to stop a kidnap attempt on a Royal while in London.

There are some scenes which experts say are nonsensical involving spy satellites, but I don't know enough about spy satellites to be able to say.

The film's weakest point is that the Sean Bean character is too emotionally unstable and violent for it to be believable that people would trust him. First of all he involves his younger brother in a murder-kidnap, then the brother is killed, then the rest of the film centres on his desire for revenge for his brother, in good old Alexei Sayle style, and he not only kills random people, but in the end he is so fixated with the revenge that he starts bumping off people on his own side.

It's a bit difficult to believe because it probably would have been wise not to take his younger brother on a mission where he might get killed, if he was that worried about it.

Anyway it's not bad overall.

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