I enjoy Tom Clancy novels if they’re read properly, which means every time you see an enormous dense block of text you skip past him verbally fellating the US military until you see some dialogue tags which signals the action is picking back up. Still, there have been a few decent Jack Ryan movies, so when I heard about Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit starring Chris Pine, I figured, hey, it might be good.

It’s not.

We pick up with Jack as an economics student in London during the 9/11 attacks. He immediately joins the military and his helicopter is shot down, leaving him with semi-crippling injuries that he has to work through, which will have no effect on the plot. His physical therapist soon-to-be-girlfriend Kiera Knightley has problems with her American accent and gets around it by contorting her mouth into even weirder shapes than usual.

Jack gets recruited by his CIA handler, Kevin Costner, who does an excellent job phoning it in. To be fair, here’s what we learn about Kevin Costner’s character throughout this movie:

–          He works for the CIA

Flash forward ten years, Jack’s working for a company on Wall Street while simultaneously analyzing the accounts and stuff for evidence of companies providing funding to terrorism or something. Eventually, he spots something that looks kinda suspicious so he decides he needs to go to Russia to view the accounts closer because they’re not available over the internets.

Also he has relationship problems.

Jack jets over to Moscow and is picked up by a guy working for the Russian company who takes Jack to his posh hotel room and promptly tries to kill him. Haha, messed with the wrong guy! Jack was a U.S. Marine for like a year before suffering crippling injuries in a helicopter crash and then spent the next ten years riding a desk job, so he makes short work of this trained assassin, drowning him in a bathtub. I wonder why this assassin waited until getting to this very public hotel instead of, I dunno, just shooting Jack in the car, but what do I know? The assassin, who works for the Evil Russian Company, is never missed, and his disappearance is never raised or questioned by the Evil Russian Company. You’d think when you hire someone to kill the American coming to visit and the guy disappears and the American is fine that maybe you grow slightly suspicious, or I dunno, send two more assassins, but not these dumbfucks.

Jack calls it in and their CIA contacts spirit the corpse away and fix up his hotel room while he meets with Kevin Costner who gives him a gun and tells him that he’s “operational” which kinda makes sense, I mean, who needs training or stuff like that?

Jack goes to the Evil Russian Company and is met by Evil Bad Guy Kenneth Branagh who explains that he just sold all of the shares to somebody else so the Evil Company is no longer tethered to Jack’s company which means Jack doesn’t get to view the files after all! But he waited to tell Jack this until after Jack got inside the building and got to thoroughly scope out the entire security system. So Jack asks him to dinner at the posh restaurant across the street and Kenneth Branagh says sure as long as his fiancé comes. Wait, fiancé? Yes, Kiera Knightley thinks he may be having an affair so she hopped on a plane to Moscow and made it inside his hotel and found his gun and concluded…that he’s having an affair. Yeah. But no worries, Jack explains that he’s in the CIA. Kiera has absolutely no problem with this or the fact that Jack has been hiding this and lying to her for the past 10 years. Conflict avoided.

They quickly put together a daring plan. Jack’s wife will flirt with Kenneth Branagh at the dinner table while Jack and his team of CIA guys break into the Evil Russian Company building. It’s absolutely foolproof and it goes off without a hitch, except for the part when Jack trips the security alarm and the head security guy who is driving home realizes and spins his car around and drives back and it’s a race against time with how fast he will get back! You’d think that tripping the security alarm might alert more than a single guy and you think that one guy might, I dunno, pick up a fucking phone and call the building security and have them lock the place down instead of just driving back but that is what someone even remotely competent would do, and these are the most incredibly fucking incompetent bad guys I have seen outside of Disney Channel Originals. Anyway, it works flawlessly and Jack shows up and walks away with his wife and Team Kenneth Branagh watch him go even though they have to know that Jack was involved, since, you know, they know Jack is in the CIA and had someone try to kill him?

So Jack types on his laptop and views the files and figures out that the Evil plan is to blow something up in New York and then immediately sell a bunch of shares which will crash the US economy, plummet the dollar, and send America into another Great Depression. Not being an economist, I don’t know how plausible this is, but whatever.

Kenneth Branagh kidnaps Kiera Knightley and they drive through Moscow while he taunts Jack on the phone so Jack drives after him, crashes his car into Kenneth Branagh’s car, punches Kenneth Branagh, and saves Kiera. Wow. That was…astonishingly simple. His wife gets kidnapped and he manages to rescue her in less than 10 minutes.

They hop on a plane and fly back to New York. You’d think that a powerful Evil Russian Company with political connections might be able to, I dunno, stall them, or hold up their ability just leave Russia, but no.

Kenneth Branagh activates his sleeper agent who may or may not be his son for reasons which are irrelevant. On the flight back, Jack does some deducing and figures out exactly where the attack is by looking at…Facebook accounts. Yes, the secret Russian terrorist cell could have avoided detection if they’d just emailed the photos of their location scouting rather than posting them on their public fucking Facebook accounts. I desperately wish I was making this shit up. Even Kiera Knightley justifies her existence by pointing out that she recognizes the building because “Jack works there”. You’d think that Jack would be able to identify the building where he works every fucking day faster than his wife. Anyway, the terrorists are going to blow up Wall Street.

The CIA starts evacuating everyone but Jack realizes that Kenneth Branagh Junior has a van painted to look like a police van stuffed with explosives so he chases Junior underground into the sewers and there’s a dramatic fistfight and then he drives the van out of the sewers while the guy in the back is messing with the explosives and Junior just keeps on fucking with the wiring instead of, I dunno, walking up to the front of this tiny van and hitting Jack in the back of the head and then driving the van back to the crucial location that will set off the chain reaction explosion. Anyway, Jack drives the van along and goes up a ramp and jumps off the back of it as it crashes through a fence and lands in the Hudson river and explodes, hurting no one except for the bad guy. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the evil plan. No contingencies. No backups.

Kenneth Branagh’s superiors are pissed that he failed so he’s quietly killed, roll credits, and you’re left staring quizzically at the screen asking yourself, wait, was that it?

Yes.