Ranking the Jack Ryans on screen

 

Jack Ryan, the protagonist of most of the Tom Clancy spy novels, has been played by five actors over the past 30+ years, starting with Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October (1990). Harrison Ford picked up the role in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). Ben Affleck took over in The Sum of All Fears (2002), which apparently killed off interest in the character for a while, as Chris Pine did not play Ryan until 2014 in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Finally, John Krasinski assumed the role in the Amazon series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan starting in 2018, with season 2 in 2019, and season 3 in 2022.

I have just one more episode of season 3 to go, so I feel like I can rank the Ryan portrayals -- with one exception: I haven't watched Affleck's try at it, so I'll leave him out of my rankings.

Again, this is a ranking of the portrayals, not the merits of the movies or TV show. It's how well each actor has inhabited the role of Jack Ryan.

1. Alec Baldwin

Jack Ryan is an analyst, not a field agent, but he did serve as a Marine, so he can get stuff done in the field. Baldwin really nailed the thinker who's sent into the field.

2. John Krasinski

Krasinski's Ryan is stockier and more action-oriented, but with the benefit of 24 episodes over three seasons, he's had the most room to make the role his. (As a side note, no one can match James Earl Jones as James Greer in terms of screen presence, so the TV show wisely doesn't try and instead has made Wendell Pierce's version an older peer who is still in the field.)

3. Harrison Ford

I've found Ford's version to be a little much of an earnest Boy Scout, culminating in the showdown scene in Clear and Present Danger where the President says to Ryan "how dare you come in here, barking like a junkyard dog," and Ryan responds, "how dare you, Mr. President." Too corny for me.

4. Chris Pine

I like Pine in pretty much everything I've seen him in (The Princess Diaries, Star Trek reboots, Wonder Woman) but he didn't really stand out as Ryan in his one appearance. He could've been any more or less generic American operative in Europe, and the movie would've been the same.

Female action stars by VAR (Violence Above Replacement level)!

Serious stat-oriented baseball fans know about a concept called "wins above replacement" (WAR), which is roughly an estimated of how many wins over the course of a season that the player is better than freely available talent. In other words, if a star player were to be injured and miss the season, to be replaced by a minor league player, how many fewer wins would the team be expected to get?


WAR is a useful way to quantify the value of baseball players in many different ways. For example, players can be ranked by career WAR, which results in Babe Ruth at the top spot, followed by Cy Young, and then Walter Johnson, Barry Bonds, and Willie Mays to round out the top 5. Or players can be ranked by top WAR in a single season, which results in a bunch of players from the pre-1920s whom I've never heard of (because I'm not that serious of a fan).


While watching Atomic Blonde last night, and marveling at how much violence Charlize Theron's character Lorraine Broughton was inflicting on East German and Russian bad guys, I started re-evaluating my own subjective ranking of female action stars. Until now, I'd considered Lucy Lawless (aka "Xena: Warrior Princess") and Angelina Jolie (Salt, Wanted, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith) to share the top spot, with Michelle Yeoh (numerous Hong Kong flicks as well as Tomorrow Never Dies), Carrie Anne Moss (The Matrix), and Summer Glau (River Tam in "Firefly" and Serenity) to be worthy competitors.


But oh my gosh, Theron is AWESOME in Atomic Blonde. Like John Wick with Keanu Reeves (co-directed by Atomic Blonde's director David Leitch), the movie seems to have been written from a process of imagining the most intense, explosive fight/gun scenes that would showcase using the star and not a stunt double, and then filling in with a story as needed. And hoo boy did the production and choreography team put a lot of imagination into the action set pieces. At 5'10", Theron commands an imposing physical presence on screen, especially when she kicks guys down the stairs.


Still, was Atomic Blonde enough to vault Theron ahead of Lawless and Jolie as an action star? I decided to turn to an equivalent of WAR. Instead of "wins," though, the standard would be "violence," as in VAR.


For me, Jolie is still #1 in VAR. Besides Salt, Wanted, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, she was also in two Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies, which is a lot of violence! Lawless played Xena for six seasons, which is over 130 episodes. Her kill count has got to be higher even than Jack Bauer's. That makes her career VAR quite high too.


Theron's tenacious performance in Atomic Blonde might well put her at the top of the single movie/episodeVAR. It's definitely a MVP (most violent performer) role. I haven't seen Mad Max: Fury Road, but I've read that she was very good in that action role, too. That's two high VAR performances, but she has a ways to go to catch up to Lawless and Jolie.


In other words, get together with director Leitch and work on Atomic Blonde 2!

Household reviews of the White House takeover movies: a difference of opinons

Back in 2013, the same movie came out twice in the theaters. Okay, not exactly the same, but basically the same. White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen were both about terrorist takeovers of the White House, in which one intrepid guy has to save the President and the country's honor. (This is hardly a novel plot, having also come up in season 7 of "24" and the Vince Flynn thriller "Transfer of Power.")

My favorite adult person in the world and I eventually got around to watching both of them on DVD, White House Down last year, and Olympus Has Fallen just recently. And while we have similar tastes in movies, we ended up disagreeing about which was the better of these dopplegangers.

[Spoilers for both flicks to follow]