PATRIOT GAMES (1992) ** Precisely what you would expect from Harrison Ford starring in film about a Tom Clancy novel with a title like this: generally entertaining to the point of occasionally even getting borderline suspenseful, several insights into hidden things, a lot of tense manly faces, laughable and incongruous attempts at male tenderness, several explosions including the climactic one that could only result from a fist fight, lots of technology and a general white-washing of the motivations of the U.S. government (but not the British, or any revolutionary groups, or used book salesmen, or anyone else). I'm perfectly willing to believe that the CIA consists of small groups of mainly white men standing around in a circle nodding in bewildered admiration and amazement at their only representative capable of masterminding the obvious, and I have no doubt that splinter groups of ideologically dubious guerilla groups are themselves inundated with splinters. I have strong reservations about most of the rest of it. Richard Harris, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Anne Archer battle in sub-heroic languid futility to raise the artistic temperature to above tepid, but Ford keeps butting his big ol' haid in to announce things about his rugged inviduality, the demands of his machismo for retribution before the scene change, and ultimate humility about it all given his maternal instincts.
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