CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER (Directed by Philip Noyce. Starring Harrison Ford, Willem Dafoe, Anne Archer, James Earl Jones)

In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford took on Irish Republican terrorists. Two years later we have a cease fire. In Clear And Present Danger, he’s up against Colombian drug cartels. Better stock up on coke while supplies last. Although the film-makers might have fared better if they had stocked up before shooting started. Clear And Present Danger needs a snort up the nose, a shot in the arm or at very least a kick up the arse to get it going.

Someone out there would like to pass Ford’s Jack Ryan off as a James Bond for the nineties, but if so the super-agent has slowed down over the years. I didn’t time it, but Ford’s first action scene in Clear And Present Danger does not come for at least an hour (or at least it seemed like an hour). And when it does, Ford doesn’t exactly take charge. He just runs around in slow motion with that over-used, trademark worried look on his face while a gang of bazooka-toting Colombian drug pushers fire missiles at him.

I have a photograph of him on my desk, caught in the midst of this crossfire. With a mop of greying hair, those permanently concerned eyes, deepening forehead wrinkles and sagging jowls, old Indy is starting to look just that: old. He looks like a worried muppet afraid that his colostomy bag is going to blow at any moment. He shouldn’t be concerned. If anything did happen, he could rest assured director Philip Noyce would turn the cameras away at the crucial moment to spare his blushes.

Noyce is a curious director for an action series. Although he has demonstrated his ability to handle tension (Dead Calm) and conflagration (Blind Fury) he evidently prefers understatement (which possibly accounts for the failure of Sliver, a film about voyeurism in which we didn’t actually get to see anything interesting). The scene of which he was most proud in Patriot Games was one in which Ford watched the wholesale destruction of a terrorist training camp over an infra-red satellite link up. Critics waxed (and some waned) eloquent about this daring device, but, let’s face it, audiences felt cheated. You pays your money, you want to see something up there on the screen. Blood, guts, explosions: this is the stuff of big-budget action thrillers, not little dots flaring up on a video monitor.

Noyce opens the film the way he means to continue, by avoiding the obvious action. Thus a US coast guard stumbles across a drug running boat after some nasty Colombians have slaughtered everyone on board, and the scene ends just before we actually see the results of the slaughter. Instead Harrison shows a video of it in the White House.

He is on speaking terms with the president because he is about to become head of the CIA. This is not a promising position for an action hero, involving much bureaucracy and all round pen-pushing. It is like making a blockbuster about MI5 concentrating on Stella Rimington: Licence To Write A Memo. The script-writers’ curious dilemma is that they have to contrive ludicrous scenarios to put this suit-and-tie, married-with-children career diplomat at the heart of the action, while the director attempts to avoid showing any action at all.

But there is a kind of desperation about this whole series. Tom Clancy was the best selling author of the eighties, and the film-makers are determined to transform booksales into cinema tickets, but first they have to trim his 300,000 (plus) word blockbusters to fit their requirements (an average script is 130 A4 pages – not closely typed). His narratives are sprawling, multi-character adventures, densely packed with military and bureaucratic detail, with Ryan as the thread that holds them together. When Die Hard director John McNaughton started the ball rolling with The Hunt For Red October, not only did he get to apply his well honed action talents to the most self-contained narrative, he had Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan. Baldwin’s advantage over Ford is not that he is a better actor (both are limited but watchable screen heroes) but that he is less famous and audiences were unlikely to protest if he was not onscreen for lengthy periods of time. Ford actually turned down the original Ryan role because he felt it wasn’t a starring part.

With Ford on board, the film grinds away trying to keep him centre stage, while cutting rapidly through a succession of short, wordy scenes that attempt to deliver a highly condensed narrative. Noyce has a first class cast working hard to bring some flavour to characters who have little time for anything but plot development, but the first half of the film gets completely bogged down in exposition. Clear And Present Danger has a hidden agenda, for while attempting to enthral viewers with a gung-ho covert operation against patently evil drug lords, it develops as a highly critical take on the whole nature of covert operations. And here the film-makers present themselves with another problem. Jack Ryan is the only character who doesn’t have any idea what is going on, caught in a battle between both sides. His complex moral dilemmas (represented by Ford frowning throughout) only succeed in impeding narrative development.

The truth is there is a lot in the source material, which is what you might expect from the kind of airport novel that registers as excess baggage when you weigh it. Noyce appears to have been drawn to the JFK-like tale of cloak and dagger government intrigue. The studio wants a fight to the death with drug barons. Clear And Present Danger delivers both, but you can still see the join. The film is already too long by the time it wends its way to an extended violent climax, in which the head of the CIA finally loosens his tie, rolls up his sleeves and flies down to Bogota to take on the drug barons and sort out the covert operation pretty much single handed. Noyce reluctantly gets involved in some shoot outs and punch ups, although he still cuts away whenever it gets too violent. It all culminates with a helicopter scene that is hampered by obvious blue screen effects, paling into insignificance next to Arnie’s airmail combat in True Lies.

Now that was a Bond for the nineties. This is a Bond for the civil service. Noyce and co. have undoubtedly attempted to create a complex, cerebral thriller, but all that grey matter on the screen comes over just as you might have predicted: grey.