The Tom Clancy books in movie form: Hit or Miss?

United States
January 27, 2007 9:48am CST
As a big fan of insurance salesman-turned-novelist Tom Clancy, I was thrilled in 1989 when I heard that The Hunt for Red October was going to be made into a film. When I saw the movie in March of 1990, I liked it even though some of my favorite parts from the novel had been cut or changed drastically to fit the story into a 2-hour running time. I thought Alec Baldwin was perfect for the role, which Clancy had created as an antidote to the whole James Bond-like Hollywood image of intelligence operatives. When Baldwin was replaced by Harrison Ford in Patriot Games, it marked the "Bond-ization" of the Clancy franchise; the character's aging (Ford being older than Baldwin) meant that Patriot Games (a prequel in the books) had to take place after Red October, and the scriptwriters changed the novel's ending to fit a more traditional Hollywood ending. Ditto for Clear and Present Danger, where the novel was gutted and robbed of some of the more interesting subplots. The worst adaptation, bar none, was The Sum of All Fears, which did the James Bond thing by casting Ben Affleck as a young Jack Ryan and really messing with Clancy's story by changing the "bad guys" and making the film a prequel to all the others. On its own, it's not a bad film, but as a Clancy adaptation, it sucks. Are there any other myLot members who have thoughts (pro or con) the Clancy-based films?
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