Bovie Movie

Harrison Ford takes over from Alec Baldwin as CIA analyst Jack Ryan in this follow-up to box-office hit The Hunt for Red October. Director Phillip Noyce has the now former agency man rescuing peer James Fox from an IRA attack in London and being hounded for his trouble by psychotic renegade terrorist Sean Bean. But, apart from one brilliant sequence showing a remote-controlled desert massacre, Noyce’s thriller (based on the novel by Tom Clancy) never gets its act together to provide the direct appeal that all good action movies should have. The movie also rides roughshod over the delicate nature of the Troubles, despite an unconvincing apologia from Richard Harris’s more politically astute terrorist. 

British theatre director Sam Mendes made an astonishing film debut with this sublime black comedy about midlife crises, starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening as a bored couple in suburban America. The sexually frustrated Bening begins an affair with estate agent Peter Gallagher; Spacey, meanwhile, fantasises about Mena Suvari, a teenage friend of his daughter’s. Their disparate needs make for a comic tragedy of misunderstanding that combines acute observations with side-splitting scenarios. This truly outstanding film (on which Steven Spielberg acted as an uncredited producer) deservedly picked up a clutch of Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actor for Spacey. 

Based upon the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst, is thrust right in the middle of a power struggle within the Colombian drug cartel after one of the President’s “life long” friends is murdered, apparently in retaliation for stealing money as part of a money laundering scheme for the cartel. Jack is then appointed acting Deputy Director of Intelligence, CIA, upon the terminal illness of Admiral James Greer, former DDI, and quickly gets in over his head due to his political naivete. The situation rapidly deteriorates when some of the presidents men convince the President to conduct covert actions against the cartel, in direct violation of congress. Felix Cortez, the security chief of Ernesto Escobeda, the “victim” of the missing money, is one of the cartel boss’s. Cortez tries to play both sides, appearing to inform Escobeda about the CIA’s involvement in the covert operations against him, while trying to orchestrate a coup to take over the cartel, with Cortez as it’s sole boss. James Cutter, the President’s National Security Advisor, makes his own deal with Cortez, with the Presidents knowledge, and halts communications to the covert troops still in Colombia, through the Deputy Director of Operations, CIA, Robert Ritter. Ryan ends up going to Colombia to rescue the covet ops troops with the help of field agent John Clark, but not before some fence mending between the two, being that Ritter blamed Ryan for the comm outage, with Clark’s men subsequently being captured by Cortez’s mercenaries.

This comedy is unusually dark for a Disney production and it makes for patchy entertainment. Three witches — Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker — are resurrected by a group of youngsters on Halloween and proceed to cause mayhem as they plot their revenge against the community that condemned them to death three centuries ago. The three stars are the best thing about the movie and they get to do one stunning musical number, a version of I Put a Spell on You. The youngsters, led by Thora Birch, acquit themselves admirably as well, but director Kenny Ortega seems unsure of the tone of the piece. Look out for a cameo role from Big director Penny Marshall.