Patriot Games (1992)

Film: Patriot Games (1992)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Patrick Bergin, SEan Bean, Thora Birch, Samuel L. Jackson, James Fox, Richard Harris

Director: Phillip Noyce

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The past two weeks we have focused on Harrison Ford as he might've been.  With The Conversation, we talked about his unique gifts for character work, giving us an important smarmy (but crucial) character in Gene Hackman's journey in the picture, and then with The Mosquito Coast we saw him attempt to escape the everyman hero that he personified in Han Solo & Indiana Jones to tremendous effect.  But Harrison Ford is not an actor you automatically name-check as a great actor-you think of him as a great movie star, and one who is relatively easy to imitate.  So this week, we're really getting into the era of Ford's "get off my plane!" level of ubiquity.  In the 1990's, Ford was a constant presence in movies and basically competed solely with Tom Cruise as the most invincible of stars at the box office.  Everything he touched would turn to gold, but while Cruise would occasionally challenge himself as an actor in these pictures, Ford didn't.  This isn't to say that Ford made bad movies during the era (ending in the late 1990's, which is where we'll close our month with him next week), but he wasn't racking up Oscar nominations like Cruise was, and most of his films are generic even if they would make buckets of money.  One of the best examples of them, and one of the few I hadn't seen yet (I was alive in the 1990's, and my mom loved Harrison Ford...I saw most of his stuff) is Patriot Games, the first of two outings that Ford would take as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, his other other franchise lead after the two I already name-checked.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jack Ryan (Ford), a man who used to work for the CIA and is now teaching history at the US Naval Academy.  He, his wife Cathy (Archer), and daughter Sally (Birch) inadvertently witness an IRA terrorist attack on Lord William Holmes (Fox), in which Jack saves Lord Holmes life.  Several members, specifically Sean Miller (Bean) survive Jack's retaliation, though, and are on a quest for revenge against both Lord Holmes (who keeps having people around him dying) and against the Ryans, which escalates to kidnapping attempts on his wife & daughter.  This all ends with us realizing that Holmes' assistant has been a secret informant, and sets up Sean to kill both Lord Holmes and the Ryans in the same party...before Jack saves the day, killing the assistant and Sean Miller in the process.

It's worth noting that this is technically the sequel to another movie, honestly a better one: The Hunt for Red October, where the Jack Ryan character was played by Alec Baldwin (we'll actually discuss this movie a bit before the end of the month in the context of the 1990 Oscar Viewing Project, which I should be done with by next Saturday if all things go according to plan).  A lot of speculation from those in the know (and Baldwin himself) has been stirred about as to why Baldwin, sixteen years Ford's junior at the time and a much more logical choice for a new action franchise, was ousted, with everything from Ford being a bigger star (who had a host of contracts with the studio they were trying to pay off) to Baldwin's salary demands (and legendarily diva-like behavior during his leading man era) all contributing to this bump, but it did happen, and it changes the tenor of the movies.  Baldwin's screen persona was always a bit more seductive & (save for Han Solo) wrier than Ford's, and it shows that Patriot Games is kind of dull.

It's not that it's necessarily bad, because it's not.  The supporting cast (actors like Harris, Bean, & Jackson) are all made up of properly good actors, and Ford knows how to command a screen, but it's also generic.  There's nothing really special about Jack Ryan, nothing that we get to know-this feels like he's just playing Harrison Ford in the way that someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger would become famous for at the same time-not giving us anything beyond what's expected.  Ford, though, was a better actor than Arnold, and it's a pity this is what he has spent much of the latter part of his career doing.  It says something that while Ford was called upon decades after-the-fact to play both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, because no one could imagine anyone else playing these parts (apologies to Alden Ehrenreich), by 2002 when they were making the long-awaited sequel to Clear and Present Danger (Ford's second outing as Jack Ryan), it was Ben Affleck, not Ford, who ended up playing the part.  Had he not been going through one of the messiest Hollywood divorces of the era, Alec Baldwin might've enjoyed the karmic revenge of Ford finally losing out on his part to a younger actor.