Chris Pine has won the lottery by winning the role of Captain Kirk, which he can play for the rest of his life if he wants to. Has he successfully reinvented Jack Ryan?
According to the first reviews coming in, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, is a pretty standard issue movie, but Pine’s big screen charisma comes through. Variety wrote that Pine was “shrewdly cast, even if this franchise reboot is a fairly routine assignment.”
Like a lot of movies these days, it’s an origin story that takes you back and shows you how so and so became so and so. Here Pine is the young Jack Ryan, and where Time thought the movie was okay, they felt Pine played the movie too young for the character.
Jack Ryan was directed by Kenneth Branagh, the acclaimed British actor who also directed the first Thor film. While it may not be the greatest movie of 2014 so far, it sounds like it could be a nice diversion for the beginning of the year. As one review put it, this is the next test to see if Pine will become a major movie star, and while this may not put him over the top, it doesn’t feel like a big mis-step either.
