Chris Pine – Action Hero Movies

Chris Pine (from Wonder Woman) stars as Jack Ryan – the lead character in this movie. He does a good job of it too.

Supporting cast members include Kevin Costner (from Waterworld) as his recruiter from the CIA, and Keira Knightley as his fiancée who discovers his line of work and ends up helping him out on a dangerous mission. Kevin does a good job, and Keira is alright. Kenneth Branagh plays the chief villain quite well too.

The premise of this movie is pushing lies from the outset – what do you expect from Hollywood? But the action and plot are still fairly captivating.

There’s an unhealthy dose of drama in the first 25 minutes. Impressionable people will end up thinking that rowing and launching insults at your partner is a way to make them treat you better. Treat them mean, keep them keen? Not for me thanks.

There’s also a bit of drug glorification in this movie, which features the consumption of illicit pills and injectables followed by depictions of feeling good. To say I’m not impressed would be an understatement.

Half way in, the action gets a bit tense & gritty for about 15 minutes. It becomes very tempting to fast forward if you’ve seen this movie before. This part may be important to the plot, but it could have been condensed for smoother viewing, especially for rewatchers. A bit later, we have a similar problem although the tense gritty drama is then mixed in with a car chase so the tempo is constantly undulating – I personally find this quite irritating. The ending is a lot smoother though, when the focus turns back to America, while still carrying a good pace, but trumpeting the same kind of nonsense as we started out with. I reckon this movie was made as a recruitment drive, encouraging simple-minded highly-strung patriotic yes-men to join law enforcement agencies. It’s like a cross between Mission Impossible and NCIS.

Overall I rate Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) as just OK. If the grittier bits were better condensed and the cooler bits were more omnipresent, it could easily be a Decent or even Pretty Good movie, but as it stands, I rate it just OK.

Wonder Woman (2017) is a pretty entertaining movie starring Gal Gadot as the Amazonian warrior tasked with killing Ares, the ‘god of war’. It’s an interesting opening, as Wonder Woman grows up on a protected island inhabited only by special Amazonian women, then she meets Chris Pine’s character as his plane crashes through the forcefield-like cloudy veil making the island invisible to outsiders.

The plot develops as he takes her to the frontline of the battle, set in “World War 1”, at the time known as the “Great War”, which of course was not great at all. Was it even the first worldwide war of that scale? I doubt it.

Anyway, for a brief moment, Wonder Woman works wonders on the battlefield – this is probably the best part of the movie, as the rest of the troops are both shocked and encouraged by her abilities.

I’m not big on watching women act like tough guys. I don’t mind women playing slick skill-based combatants like Elektra, Colombiana, Catwoman, etc, because they retain their femininity, but when it comes to tough-guy warriors I prefer to see men in that kind of role. Having said that, Gal Gadot retains just about enough of her femininity to make this a good movie. She’s not acting like a tough guy with balls & muscles – instead, she’s performing with god-given enhanced abilities, so it kind of works well. Her acting is not bad either.

Chris Pine does a respectable job of acting in this movie too. He’s in a bit of a beta-male role, compared to what he’d be doing if he were the lead star of a movie like this, but he retains just about enough manliness and charisma to be passable without criticism on that note. That’s quite a feat in itself – well done Chris.

All in all, I rate this movie slightly lower than the likes of Thor and Black Adam which have strong & manly men in the lead roles. Well, Dwayne Johnson is strong and quite manly, and Chris Hemsworth is at least more strong & manly than Gal Gadot, I think? Plus, those movies have just as many awesome moments as this one.

And I rate Wonder Woman slightly higher than Black Panther and Doctor Strange, since they’re both led by beta-male men, and have a similar level of awesome adrenaline-buzzing moments – in fact they’re probably slightly inferior to Wonder Woman in that respect.

Indeed, I rate Wonder Woman (2017) about equal to Ghost In The Shell from the same year, starring Scarlett Johansson – another woman who is equally just about feminine & attractive enough but still powerful enough a character to take the lead role in an action-packed superhero movie and make it work quite well.

The sequel

If you enjoyed Wonder Woman (2017) don’t forget to check out its sequel Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) which is a bit less delicately composed in the action early on, but is generally still of a decent quality. It has a substantially new plot that’s a bit quirky and is a bit more depressing, as Wonder Woman slowly loses her powers and the world turns to pandemonium, but it’s not a bad sequel still, it’s quite well made, and like the first, the sequel also goes on for over two hours.

I would rate the sequel one or two levels below the original; equal to or slightly inferior to Black Panther and its sequel; equal to or slightly better than The Matrix Resurrections. Because it has strong plot development early on, and retains its fun aspect quite well, but when it gets depressing it never really opens back up, which makes for an experience far less comfortable & enjoyable than it should be – I guess this goes hand in hand with world events of 2020 – maybe that was the vibe DC were going for.

Wonder Woman also appears in various other DC movies – most notably Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017) where she has substantial roles. She also has short cameo appearances in Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) and The Flash (2023).