Tom Clancy's Without Remorse

With movie theaters still struggling to open and a lack of new offerings for them to play, we've all turned more and more to streaming services for our entertainment. One of the more recent offerings comes to us from the folks at Amazon and stars Michael B Jordan in the origin story of Navy Seal, Senior Chief, John Kelly. Jordan's character takes a rightful place in the Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan universe. That said, I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum.

Kudos to Michael B. Jordan for his portrayal of John Kelly. The character is everything we would want in an action hero, and the story garners the sympathy of the viewer well even if it is just a new take on an old hook. When Senior Chief Kelly's team and family are taken out by a group of assassins, Kelly himself awakes in a hospital after getting each of the enemies except the one that got away. Kelly needs answers and that is exactly what he'll get, but with even more questions as the hero works his way toward who set up his team and killed his wife and unborn child.

Jordan is joined by Jodie Turner-Smith as Karen Greer. Greer is meant to take up the mantle of Jim Greer who was played by James Earl Jones in the Harrison Ford lead Jack Ryan Tom Clancy movies. As a seal and trusted colleague/friend of the main character, she proves instrumental in pushing the story and the action along through the film. Jamie Bell plays a sketchy CIA agent named Robert Ritter, much like the Ritter in the earlier films, but in this case, we don't know until the very end if he's as smarmy as the original Ritter or if he's someone that can be trusted. With Greer and Ritter alongside him, Kelly's questions about who he can trust will have to be put aside as the mission comes first.

Landing in prison for taking out one of the players Kelly is aided by his colleagues and put to task to fly into Russia and conduct an operation on Russian soil to take out one of the agency's former tools believed to have turned. The action and intensity are high as they have to fight their way into the country, locate their target, and only then learn the truth behind who their real enemy is.

As Kelly faces the reality that the country he fought for, bled for, and lost men for has turned on him, getting his new team out of Russia is the only mission he can see. Until they're safe, the former seal won't have done what he signed up to do, what he took an oath to do, protect America.

The movie plays well as it uses the current day reality of relations between Russian and the United States returning to something resembling that of the cold war era. A Russian attack on US soil is certainly unfathomable, except for in the current era of spying, political interference, and regularly announced sanctions. When Kelly realizes how high up into the government the nefarious plans go, he has a tall task ahead of him. Like any action hero story arc that starts with the loss of his team, his wife, and his child, nothing stops the hero from setting things right even if revenge is a morally questionable act.

At the end of the day, the heroes come through. John Kelly is no more, officially if not literally. What this edition of the Tom Clancy movies brings us is a promising future as Michael B Jordan shows once again that he's got the chops to do action. In the end, there's a scene where the ghost of John Kelly floats an intriguing possibility at Robert Ritter, the new CIA Director, and he wants to call it "Rainbow."

For all intents and purposes, we may have just witnessed them promising a Rainbow 6 series of movies. For those fans of action games and action movies, this is a promise I hope that the creators, producers, and Michael B. Jordan manage to keep. Without Remorse was a great return to the action genre and left me wanting to see John Kelly's return for this alluded to "Rainbow" project.