After three decades spent on the fringes of Tom Clancy hero Jack Ryan’s many movies and television series, John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan) finally steps up to his own starring vehicle in Amazon Studios’ Without Remorse.
In the film’s opening sequence, Kelly leads a team of U.S. Navy SEALS on a rescue mission in Aleppo, Syria. It turns out the hostage-takers are not Syrian Army as reported, but Russian ex-military; something that the team’s shifty CIA operative Robert Ritter (Jamie Bell) firmly denies, right before dropping a bomb on the building and obliterating all evidence to the contrary. Three months later and now stateside, several of the SEALs on that mission are violently assassinated.
Kelly, however, proves a more difficult target than anticipated: he takes out three of the four assailants and narrowly survives the attack. His pregnant wife Pam (Lauren London) isn’t so lucky, and so begins John Kelly’s rage- and grief-fuelled revenge mission to track down those responsible.
Based on Tom Clancy’s 1993 bestselling novel, Without Remorse sees Hell or High Water and Sicario writer Taylor Sheridan, reunite with Day of the Soldado director Stefano Sollima. Given the creative team behind it, one could reasonably expect this to be another rugged, intelligent, action-packed thriller.
Yet despite Jordan’s intense, tortured performance and a strong supporting cast that includes Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim) and Guy Pearce, all that audiences receive is a formulaic, sullen action film with a haphazardly constructed and fatally predictable plot. Add to that some clunky, on-the-nose dialogue (complete with corny chess analogies), thoroughly outdated geopolitical motivations, clumsy pacing, and mostly flat characterisation, and even the best-choreographed action cannot rescue this offering from banality.
And because there also lacks a distinct or compelling ‘Bad Guy’, and the protagonists are themselves broadly unengaging, Without Remorse struggles to raise the stakes it needs to qualify as a thriller. It’s a real shame then that despite a great starring turn from Jordan, solidly filmed action sequences and good set pieces, Without Remorse lacks the personality or originality to distinguish itself from genre stock.
Without Remorse releases April 30th.