Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

- inside the huge Cathedral of Christ the Saviour? Nope ;)

This week's movie rental was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit ...

a 2014 American action thriller film, directed by and co-starring Kenneth Branagh. Chris Pine, Kevin Costner and Keira Knightley star in leading roles. The film features the fictional Jack Ryan character created by author Tom Clancy. It is the fifth film in the Jack Ryan series but is presented as a reboot that departs from the previous installments. Unlike its predecessors, it is not an adaptation of a particular Clancy novel, but rather an original story. Pine stars in the title role, becoming the fourth actor to play Ryan, following Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck .... The film is dedicated to Clancy, who died on October 1, 2013.

I've seen three of the past four Jack Ryan movies (see my post on The Hunt for Red October) but I didn't like this version quite as much as the others .... though I do like Chris Pine (Captain Kirk! :) and Kevin Costner, I don't especially like Keira Knightley .... when I see her I can't help thinking of her creepy role in the movie about Freud/Jung ... and when I see Kenneth Branagh, I think about his pretty bad Dead Again ;)

One interesting bit in the film has the Russian bad guy played by Branagh visiting (supposedly) the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour ...

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior rose before him, its five golden onion domes dull against the heavy gray sky. The original cathedral had been dynamited by Kaganovich in 1931 on orders from Stalin, supposedly because it blocked the view from the window of his Kremlin apartment. In its place the Bolsheviks had attempted to erect a massive government skyscraper called the Palace of Soviets, but the riverside soil proved unsuitable for such a building and the construction site flooded repeatedly. Eventually, Stalin and his engineers surrendered to the inevitable and turned the land into a public swimming pool -- the world's largest, of course. Rebuilt after the fall of communism at enormous public expense, the cathedral was now one of Moscow's most popular tourist attractions.
- Moscow Rule by Daniel Silva, p. 331

Here's Richard Roper's review of the movie ...