If you’re like most Americans, you probably won’t be watching "Captain America: Brave New World" when it hits theaters this weekend. The film has been plagued with expensive reshoots, lousy reviews, and a “star” who foolishly declared “Captain America doesn’t represent America.” One reviewer I listened to on the way into work this morning – sarcastically supplying some positive note about the picture – announced “It’s one of the two best films to feature Harrison Ford as the President of the United States!”
While the other referenced outing – "Air Force One" – is a pretty good, the 1990s far better Harrison Ford-starring, POTUS-related entertainment is "Clear and Present Danger," which entertains while capturing the quaint simplicity of the time.
Based on politically conservative Tom Clancy’s successful book series, Danger has his hero, CIA Analyst Jack Ryan, caught up in an illegal war against a Latin American drug cartel. While drugs are the eponymous Danger, the real villain of the piece is government overreach. After some of the movie President’s friends are killed by a Colombian drug lord, the POTUS exact revenge using American military assets. When our Ryan uncovers this, he exposes the conspiracy to light and saves the day.
If the primitive technology or Fidel Castro references weren’t enough to remind you of the time, the quaintness of the conflict certainly does. We didn’t realize at the time that – between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers – the 1990s were a time of unprecedented peace and stability. Americans mostly all agreed on the same things. We all agreed on that politics ended at our shores, that drugs were bad, and that our leaders should behave with honor. If we were going to kill some drug dealers and blow up their stuff, we should at least do it the right way.
From my time in Washington, I’ve always found "Danger" among the most realistic depictions of the city – far removed from House of Cards’ political porn of or Bones’s obviously filmed in Los Angeles car chases. Indeed, while "Hunt for Red October" is widely regarded as the most popular instance of the Jack Ryan franchise, "Danger" is probably the smartest written. I could be biased because this is the movie that inspired me to enter politics as a career.
There’s a moment where Harrison Ford advises the POTUS on how to outwit the press by telling them that the murdered gentleman wasn’t just his friend but his "lifelong friend." The plan ends up working brilliantly. I remember seeing that as a young man and thinking how great it would be to do that for a job. (And it’s proven to be good job security too, as the press always need outwitting.)
The Jack Ryan character, while he’s been a fixture of American pop culture for about 40 years, has never really been a character. He’s always a blandly written, handsome white American male who reflects our concerns at the time: whether it was drugs, Russian super-weapons, or – you want to talk about quaint – Irish terrorists. Ryan is so bland that he’s been played indistinguishable by five different men on screen. The most recent instance is the Amazon Prime Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series, where The Office’s John Krasinski demonstrates just how far removed America is from the golden 90s.
Whereas "Danger" features plenty of flags and patriotism, Amazon made Ryan’s boss Jim Greer a Muslim so they could lecture us on the dangers! of Islamophobia! (Unrelated article about the Muslim “asylum seeker” who almost murdered 30 people in Munich here.) Amazon’s Jack Ryan is so stupid woke that fellow Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote how show makes him cheer for Hollywood’s doom!
Which seems to be the direction they’re going if predictions hold true about how bad "Captain America: Brave New World" is going to bomb. Indeed, if Disney weren’t so scared, the film would still carry its original, more ominous title of "New World Order." There’s no appetite for anti-anti-globalist propaganda these days, as right-wing populists are reclaiming their countries across the world. This isn’t 2015, where Donald Trump’s ascendancy sparked eager criticism from his own party, nor is it even 2020, where we tolerated the insanity of COVID lockdowns and BLM riots.
But it is also no longer the 1990s, alas. However, if you’re interested in an engaging film about how simple politics were back then, "Clear and Present" is clearly a better choice than "Brave New World."
Join the conversation as a VIP Member