Review: Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse (2021)
Directed by Stefano Sollima; screenplay by Taylor Sheridan and Will, based on ‘Without Remorse’ by Tom Clancy; starring Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith and Jamie Bell.
I remember when I was younger and I wanted to play the cooler-looking video games that had an age certificate a little too old for me, I’d often have to make the case to my parents for why they should even consider letting me get them. Sometimes it would be a matter of doing a bit of research online into why a certain game deserved its rating but other times it would be a matter of appealing to my parents’ sense of artistic value. This is to say that, by relating a game - which was often pretty far out of their realm of experience - to something they knew to be a little bit more tasteful like a film (the Quantum of Solace video game adaptation was my only first-person shooter for a long while) or a book, I found I could often circumvent my parents’ immediate adversity to anything a little too mature.
One of these kinds of comparisons I’d often use to, let’s say, “elevate” these usually fairly violent games was actually just the name Tom Clancy. I mean, this one felt smart to me. Even back then it was apparent that the man would plaster his name on anything, so I had a whole world of games to explore by tapping into the associations an author’s approval brought. It was like I’d found a kind of precedent upon which to build a series of winning cases.
Now, the thing is, I really didn’t know much about Tom Clancy when I was around twelve years old, I had no idea what American patriotism was, let alone nationalism or imperialism. The concept of the military-industrial complex was pretty far out of my purview back then. So the implications of relating the games I wanted to sit in front of for hours on end to such an author as Clancy was pretty much lost on me. I admittedly still know relatively little (I’ve done a bit of research on him for this review but I haven’t read any of his directly authored works) about the man but increasingly, as I’ve been exposed to more and more of his work in its endlessly multitudinous states of adaptation, I’ve been thinking back to those cases I made to my parents to get them to let me play HAWX or Ghost Recon and I keep thinking: why was Tom Clancy’s work ever a good thing to build my cases on?
Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse (as it seems desperate to be called) is directed by Stefano Sollima, whose most recent cinematic outing was the disappointing and predictably unnecessary follow up to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, Sicario: Day of the Soldado - a bloated film that completely fumbles what its predecessor was going for, instead opting to shallowly revel in its distinct aesthetic identity. It always reminds me of Jarhead and all of its horrendous sequels.
Surprisingly, Sollima is rejoined here by screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who wrote the screenplays for both Villeneuve’s original and Sollima’s follow-up. Sheridan is a truly difficult writer to pin down in all honesty, his work on Sicario was really impressive to me (particularly his self-professed allergy to exposition), as was his script for Hell or High Water. Add to this what I felt was a skilled and compelling directorial debut in Wind River, and it’s utterly dumbfounding that Sheridan constantly feels the need to return to such, what he must know to be, shoddy projects as Soldado and now Without Remorse.
Anyway, I’ve prattled for far too long.
The plot of the film is absolutely nothing new, a well-trodden (arguably trodden-to-death) sub-genre of the action flick, wherein a badass operative, wronged by an unquestionably evil-doing (so we don’t have to think too hard about the guys he’s dispatching) antagonist, goes on the warpath to seek some kind of retributive justice. In fact add to this the fact that the film’s central character, the gloriously named John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan), is a US Navy Seal and you’ve probably got yourself a sub-sub-genre right there. In this particular addition to the badass-takes-things-into-their-own-hands genre, Kelly’s pregnant wife is brutally murdered in her own bed in an act of retaliation for the mission Kelly and his team carried out in Syria some time before, which itself led to the death of some Russian operators.
And that’s it, really. Well, not really, the film is going to try to convince you it’s more than that, but seriously that’s it. You get some unbelievably transparent twists and turns along the way, but in the end, it’s all just to facilitate the central character’s bloodthirst and self-righteousness.
In response to his wife (she’s called Pam and is played by Lauren London, but it really only matters that she’s his wife and has indeed been murdered) being murdered, Kelly seeks out a Russian diplomat and in one of the most egregiously melodramatic acts of violence I’ve ever seen a super special forces operator commit on-screen, sets his car alight, only to clamber inside to point a gun at him to demand some answers. Of course, the diplomat gives him said answers and the plot is allowed to trundle onwards.
As others have mentioned, Jordan plays Kelly with a kind of rigid intensity that is admirable, but all the story ever seems to call for from him is complete emotional constipation. Occasionally, we get a few guttural groans, but it is quite difficult to discern whether the pain is coming from any inner turmoil or just from a gunshot wound or something. It’s a really frustrating turn to see for Jordan because he’s incredibly compelling to watch whenever he’s featured in something, has been that way ever since The Wire. To compound this frustration, though, Kelly is so supremely unlikeable it’s really tricky to see whether the film is just going down the “you may not like his methods, but he gets results” road, or is actually making an earnest, if ultimately failed, at some moral complexity.
In one laughable 180, the film seems initially concerned with the cold-blooded murder of two Russian police officers (who I might add roll right into the middle of an active firefight with no backup and no equipment, which we later see the police do have) at the hands of a couple of snipers, only for Kelly to turn around and murder many more in the name of “self-sacrifice.” It’s just bewildering what the film’s going for here. And, look, I get that it’s just an action film, but not even the most dedicated aficionado of the genre can survive those levels of subtextual whiplash.
I realise at this point that I’ve not really mentioned any of the rest of the cast here. And I’m not going to. There’s really very little point. They’re all just window dressing for the power fantasy on display. The elected bureaucrats that run things are the evil ones, the CIA are the good guys, as are the badasses (and smartasses as one of the badasses quips), on both sides with guns. The conflict can only ever be contrived when every character knows exactly what to do at all times, until they don’t because it’s not supposed to be too easy.
Maybe give this one a skip if you were hoping for a little more.
Watched on 3rd May 2021