Without Remorse (2021 | USA | 110 minutes | Stefano Sollima)
Having previously transformed Jim from The Office into a globe-trotting action hero, Amazon Studios has now turned their attention to a much easier lift: expanding their Clancyverse to include Michael B. Jordan as a score-settling former Navy SEAL John Clark. Although Clark has bounced around many of Tom Clancy’s spy thrillers in both leading and supporting roles, the primary inspiration for this catapulting him into a starring role appears to be the Rainbow Six video game series. And honestly, that’s probably why this origin story of how special forces soldier John Kelly came to be multi-national dark ops spymaster John Clark feels a lot less like a movie than a series of first-person shooter missions.
Helmed by Stefano Sollima (whose maximalist and addictive drama ZeroZeroZero breathlessly explored a globe-spanning drug trade), Without Remorse relies on a script by Taylor Sheridan & Will Staples that modernizes Clancy’s novel into the present day, shifting the story from drug cartels to shadowy political intrigue. The film opens in media res with a bang (or rather, many many of them) as a strike force gets more resistance than expected (from the meddling Russians, everything old is eventually new again) during a hostage extraction in a dark and dusty Syrian safehouse. The good guys mostly make it out alive, but are none too pleased with the CIA dude (Jamie Bell, whose high-ranking operative is as comfortable being an opaque asshole in the field as in a boardroom) for throwing them into a bad situation without all of the intel.
It turns out that Kelly’s not the only one chuffed about how the Aleppo operation went down. While the American soldiers mull over their gripes back at home, the Russians are secretly plotting a payback that interrupt’s our hero’s return to the regular lives of cracking beers and, you know, having doomed pregnant wives who exist for the sole purpose of dying to providing motivation for an adoring husband with a bright future in private security in favor of becoming a full-time vengeance machine. And so, with blessedly little opportunity to get attached to ordinary humans, a swift series of violent attacks shifts Without Remorse into unrepentant Michael B. Jordan competence porn.
To his credit, Jordan is very good at portraying someone who’s very good at the awful work of revenging and Sollima stages these episodes with dramatic flair. He gives us episode after episode of Kelly doing incredible stuff like not getting killed by police after setting a car on fire at the airport and not getting killed by prison guards while fighting off a SWAT team in a high security prison. Other missions take advantage of facility with weaponry, tactical expertise, and, in a tremendous sinking aircraft setpiece, extreme breath control. My experience with video games is pretty much limited to Italian-American plumbers and pocket monsters; so I have no sense of whether these dark sequences will satisfy longtime Rainbow Six devotees, but I admit that some of the imagery and execution is striking.
Anyone expecting connective tissue between these missions, though, should look elsewhere. The script lurches from one to the next with little character or plot development as support. In a bit of interesting casting, Jodie Turner-Smith plays Kelly’s closest ally Lt. Commander Karen Green — a former member of his team (setting this story in a hopefully near-future where the Navy has admitted women to the SEAL program) who’s now a high-level liaison in the National Security complex — taking the place of frequent Ryanverse associate James Green (frequently portrayed by James Earl Jones). Like most people in the film, she doesn’t have much to do character-wise, but holds her own in the action sequences and stands out for having some baseline history and motivation. Which brings us to Jamie Bell’s CIA agent Robert Ritter and Guy Pearce as Secretary of Defense Thomas Clay. Bell at least seems to enjoy playing someone whose entire personality is “jerk”, but as would-be antagonists or allies to Kelly both are so limited in their conception that it’s hard to meet any eventual revelations about their motivations with more than a shrug.
None of these complaints about coherence will come as a surprise to anyone who survived the hot mess that was Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Sheridan and Sollima’s last collaboration. Nor will the heavy-handedness of the updated storyline — so very many monologues about pawns and kings (we get it, chess is popular now!) and a pervasive mournfulness about the fallen state of American democracy — be unfamiliar to viewers of Sheridan’s oeuvre. Current political realities works their way into a series of plot-twists in ways that are both eye-rollingly direct, but maybe a little more accurate than I’d like to admit. By the nature of its construction, though, it’s more of a flat series of adventures with limited personal or emotional stakes.
Ultimately, Without Remorse is conceived and executed an origin story intended to launch a franchise. By sheer force of will and suppressed glimmers of Michael B. Jordan’s enduring charisma, it accomplishes that mission, but it’s still frustrating that it didn’t attempt to do anything more than set the stage for future adventures.
Without Remorse premieres on Prime Video on April 30.
(Header image credit: Nadja Klier via Paramount Pictures)