Granted, Tom Clancy’s books aren’t for everyone, and did become a ‘bit’ formulaic, but this review is literally damning with faint praise…
Since debuting on Amazon’s Prime Video service on April 30, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse has earned a score of 5.8 on IMDB, and an audience rating of 43 percent on Rotten Tomatoes—hardly stellar scores for such a high profile release.
That suggests there was quite a bit of remorse among viewers, and one audience review posted on Rotten Tomatoes may have summed up the made-for-TV movie particularly well, “As formulaic as it is implausible, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse delivers the bare minimum as an action thriller—and will leave Clancy fans particularly disappointed.”
What actually further adds to the disappointment is that a film adaption of Tom Clancy’s 1993 novel, which served as an “origin” story for the character of former Navy SEAL John Clark (nee Kelly), has been a long time in coming. What finally arrived was a significant misfire.
Full article HERE, from Gun Mag Warehouse.
I won’t waste my time watching it, just like I won’t waste my time watching the Lee Childs/Jack Reacher movies with Tom Cruise. Talk about blown casting!!! Cruise is a shrimp. Reacher is a huge man and that is integral to the story line… Sigh…
I’ve read a lot of Clancy novels as well as several of the Reacher novels.
I really liked the book Without Remorse, having read it a few times. Just as the character, Reacher, John (Kelly) Clark is a big white dude with intelligence and animal like cunning.
The best rendition of one of Clancy’s novels, was The Hunt For Red October. The movie actually tracked well with the book. Perhaps because Clancy had a lot of input as an executive producer.
Hollywood’s problem is their now constant habit of trying to put diversity in every movie or show.
As far as the character of Jack Reacher, the best actor to have played him, would have been someone along the lines of a Joe Don Baker or perhaps Bo Svenson.
As bad as I hate to say it, Ben Affleck would make a good Reacher. Or Liam Neeson or even Jason Mamoa. They are all at least 6′-4″ tall.
YMMV
I read the book and they destroyed everything written in the book. I can understand wanting to change the time frame, but Kelly is a huge White man, a deadly seal with about every medal the US can give. He goes on a killing spree in Baltimore when his love is killed by a thug in a robbery.
The movie made him Black, smaller, planned to be killed and he is injured and his family gets killed, and then goes to Russia for payback. Nothing matches.
I had my say on my blog about the racial demographic (very woke) in regard to this film, on my blog a few weeks ago. Amazon is heavily invested in this sort of thing and the racist viewing audience was not impressed. I personally have no intention to watch it.
This wasn’t a Clancy book, played out on the screen. It was the bastardization of Clancy and the story he originally wrote for the sake of trying to attract a crowd by name recognition and a species of clickbait.
There’s not much new out there worth watching, Old NFO.
Clancy had fun pissing himself over what The Biz did to his novels when he was alive, until the day he died. 24/7/365. it was his second career, after writing.
He finally realized that a writer’s job, once he sells the rights, is to spend the check, and STFU.
That dawning realization is when he stopped selling them rights to anything further. His estate is clearly only interested in the money. (Like anyone reading the phoned-in novellas concocted since his death couldn’t figure that out in a new York minute).
QED
Of course Hollyweird fornicated Without Remorse; he refused to sell them any more novels while he was alive after he saw what they did with everything after Hunt For Red October (the only book of his they got sort of right).
Hollywierd screws the pooch with published works because they CAN.
Anyone unaware of this should write it on their hand in laundry pen, as a memory aid. Particularly published authors.
OTOH, not being a Lee Child book fan myself, Cruise’s movies of same have been raging successes, no matter how diehard Childs fans feel about that (and I get that). When you can find someone with Cruise’s box office who happens to be 6’8″ instead of 5’5″, and built like a meat packer who juggles cows for fun, or an NFL middle linebacker, talent agents in Hollywood are awaiting your call.
The fact that Matt Damon looks like a spastic kid having a seizure during an acid trip when he fights hand-to-hand has done nothing to diminish the ongoing success of the Jason Bourne franchise, and for similar reasons. He brings box office, and he gets story. He didn’t win his screenwriting Oscar on a fluke. So his shortcomings in MMA can be largely forgiven, and hidden with recourse to scene editing by a kid with ADHD, downing energy drinks by the six-pack, and out of ritalin for a month.
At root, the business part of “show business” is to put butts in seats. If they could cast Warwick Davis or Danny DeVito as Jack Reacher, and pull $300M a pop in box office, and they told a good story, I’d still buy the ticket.
Where they throw the “business” out the window is when they not only screw the pooch on story, but deliver a badly-adapted one, and then compound the error by carpet-bombing it in “wokeness” as if it was liquid fertilizer sprayed from cropdusters.
When they avoid this error, the “business” model works.
When they don’t, they lay turds the size of the Rocky Mountains.
Ask Disney about putting Kathleen Kennedy in charge of memory-raping the entire Star Wars franchise (she’d need the entire SAS as bodyguards if she ever showed up in person at any Fan Con, and will until she dies); bring up Jar Jar Abrams’ work with pounding the Star Trek tentpole all the way into the ground; mention Sam Mendes’ dismantling of 007, and driving that series right over the cliff without a parachute.
That sort of stupidity is what’s burning Hollyweird to the ground, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of woketards.
If yu’re going to do this right, either show the circumspection J.R.R. Tolkien’s family did with Lord Of the Rings and The Hobbit; or else do what Stan Lee did: insist on final production say in anything made, with an iron-clad guaranteed kill switch in your contract.
Or else, take the check, cash it, and STFU.
And given Hollyweird’s compulsory penchant, I wouldn’t watch Without Remorse even if they strapped me to a metal chair, and cut off my eyelids.
The way to beat them at their own game though, is to make a great faithful adaptation of it, with stellar production values, and without permission, let the internet bootleg it, a la China for the last 40 years, and then sit back, and watch Hollywood play whack-a-mole when your version goes viral, and pops up 200 times a day everywhere, forever.
It could be done in a month or two, for under $100K, all in.
And the producers of the horrible “official” version would be eating a 10-foot party sub sh*t sandwich for decades.
That alone makes doing the bootleg version a moral imperative.
It’s the only way they’ll ever learn.
After reading the Dune series, and watching the cinematic efforts to portray a book with a substantial amount of the story having little dialogue, but rich passages of thought, I decided turning good books into movies is usually a failed effort. Some efforts are better than others, but the richness of a book is lost in the removal of key ingredients.
The “Frank Herbert’s Dune” and “Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune” mini-series that was filmed in the Czech Republic and shown on Sci-Fi network were pretty darned good, only adding info and character exposition when needed. Both got very high ratings even from Dune fans.
Funny, the main criticism of the two mini-series was they stuck too faithfully to the source material. Which is why I enjoyed them so much. Much better than the movie, much much better.
And the Sardukar look like the bad-asses they were, not idiots running around in firefighting outfits.
“Without Remorse” was a great book.
Have not seen the movie nor will I.
Always wonder why the movie makers take a great story and characters and then throw it away and start over.
The movie “Sum of All Fears” was a joke as an interpretation on the book.
I watched the movie, free on unlimited. It is positively absolutely horrible. I left a 1 star review and commented if I could give a zero or negative star I would have. Absolute waste of time on their part in filming that piece of garbage and of anyone who watches the thing.
I’m still bitter about the atrocious adaptation of Pratchett’s ‘Watch’ books (‘The Watch’ on BBCA).
Hence why I pray that many of my favorite authors will NOT option their books for TV/movie adaptations. Hollyweird tends to screw them up all the time.
I’m a huge fan of the Jack Reacher books, and was shocked to see Tom Cruise (The Mighty Midget) in the role. Although I have read a few of the Clancy novels, he does not impress me enough to wait for the next one. I’ll just wait on the next J.L. Curtis book.
During the Democrat Primaries, 98% of the DEMOCRAT VOTERS agreed with “Doctor” Jill Biden in telling Kamala Harris to Go F@ck Herself.
AND ONLY 2% of the Democrats wanted Kamala Harris to be the President,thus forcing Kamala to drop out.
The DNC got the last laugh over those 98% of Democrats, though, by forcing the Puppet, “Dementia” Joe to take Harris as his Vice President running mate…and now here she is messing up everything that she does, and proving that the consensus of the Democrats that DIDN’T approve of her was Correct .
As SHE HERSELF proved that It was a huge mistake r to put Camela as the VP choice.
These bad adaptations and so forth aren’t happening because someone screwed up. They’re happening because certain people want to wreck what you love. Destroying iconic and beloved characters is their primary goal, not an unfortunate accidental outcome.
As director Taika Waititi (Cohen) infamously said, “I’ll ruin your mythos in a minute, baby.”
Although I enjoyed The Hunt for Red October in spite of a few technical screw ups, I generally don’t care for Tom Clancy. This comes under the heading of personal preference, such as preferring chocolate ice cream over strawberry. All that said, the saying is Get woke, go broke. RottenTomatoes has had to adjust their consumer rating on more than one occasion because the ratings failed to support the preferences of the Left.
Philistine! Strawberry ice cream is obviously and clearly superior to chocolate.
Strawberry ice cream is for people too cheap to buy real strawberries. 🙂
I’m waiting for a Sam Peckinpah-like director to make a couple of movies out of “The Grey Man” series. Epic!
They’ll have to do some editing. Finding an actor to play the lead without showing traces poisonous masochism or whatever they call it will be hard.
Sam Elliot – but he would certainly NOT be ‘politically correct’ enough – not that any of the book series would be for that matter.
It’s like HBO’s “Lovecraft Country.” Pretty much an all-POC cast. For a decidedly most white ‘world.’
So, well, nope for me.
Now, let’s turn around and have a remake of “Zulu” but with the Zulu all white and the plucky troop be all Wakandians or something. And hear the screaming out loud. Heck, with today’s equipment, you could probably just do the whole blackface/whiteface thing and toss it out on the internet, from several secure, nontraceable locations, and hear the idiots scream and holler about ‘how good it is…’ Idiots.
To me, John Clark was, is and will be a tall, muscular white American of Irish descent, who is Catholic, and a SEAL and a guy who deals with black/white solutions (or on/off solutions.) There’s not a lot of shades of grey in the guy.
So, well, Bezos can go suck-start a school bus using the exhaust pipe. And lament that Richard Branson will get into ‘space’ sooner than he will. Muhahahahahahaha.
Welllllllllllll, given that Clancy is dead and gone, I will not be picking up any “NEW” “Clancy” books. And it’s been some years since I read those few I did.
All- Thanks for the comments, and yes, Hollyweird does what it will…sigh…
Posted from my iPhone.
“Welllllllllllll, given that Clancy is dead and gone, I will not be picking up any “NEW” “Clancy” books. And it’s been some years since I read those few I did.”
And, for Lee Child fans, he’s handed the reins over to his kid, and it’s turned out like you would expect – I (fortunately) got it from the library instead of buying it, and that the book belonged to someone else is the only reason I didn’t TBAR it (Throw Book Across Room) by page 75. Saves me time, though, I now know I never have to spend a minute reading anything from Child.
An author doesn’t have to die to become useless, just hire some wandering minstrel type with their own typewriter to turn out pages to keep the dollars flowing.
Sounds like we all agree on most every good book being totally messed up by the movie making ….
I like the Reacher books (thanks for the warning on the new one, Allen), and I was also wondering who the hell cast Cruise as Reacher given the disparity of size. But then I found out that Cruise was the original purchaser of the film rights, so he gets to do what he wants with his property … he brought a reasonable attitude if not the physical imposition to the role… But I’ll not be reading any more if they are as bad as Allen said.
I always thought the WEB Griffin books would be good cinema, but they’d probably get messed up, too. And in the later ones, I got tired of paying to read many pages of the ‘backstory’that was in the books I had already read.
And oh yeah, I haven’t visited a movie theater for years since Hollywood got so damn PC then woke … and I’m about to stop watching TV since they have also saturated their shows and advertising with ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, and subliminal and not so subliminal woke BS.
I read a couple of WEB Griffin books way back in the day until I saw that he had a major burr up his ass about the Navy. That’s when I stopped and never picked up another.
Vignettes on the post above:
I thought that Cruise did a good job in the Reacher movies but apparently I’m in the minority. I agree that it changed the character but OK. Whatever.
Dick Francis enlisted his son Felix to “co-write” novels. They are uniformly pieces of trash. Felix apparently can’t write a character to save his life, has no idea how to come up with a good plot, and thinks that a book needs detailed sex scenes in order to sell. Sons taking over for fathers rarely works out well in real life book writing. Notice that Christopher Tolkien never tried to write more books but rather spent most of his life compiling and organizing his father’s copies notes and histories.
A cabal of writer’s are cranking out Robert Parker novels starring Jesse Stone, Spencer, and Whatserlips, female detective. A few of them have been decently written, more of them haven’t. I lost track of who was good and stopped reading them altogether.
I like the Spencer and the Jesse Stone series, and was very sorry when Robert Parker passed away. Then the next books in the series appeared, and maybe one out of five books was close to being accurate in style and was decently written. Take your choice.
The joy boys tried making Spenser films, and what they produced was completely FUBAR. Completely.
Cruise did (IMO) an excellent job portraying Jack Reacher. Had it been some Schwarzenegger in the lead, I’d never have watched it. Strange for me to come to an expectation of a book series from a movie, but that’s how this one evolved for me. A B-I-L gave me several copies of the book while I was recuperating from a heart attack. I preferred Cruise to Childs’ imagination.
Allen/Tom/Hereso- Good point(s). And I haven’t been to a theater in probably 10 years…
Why not try and cast a real Seal – hello, Tim Kennedy would be perfect…and real. Make a SEAL an actor, instead of making an actor into a SEAL.
Apparently you’re not too familiar with the great action and wooden acting in Act Of Valor.
In which it only took 90 minutes to demonstrate that while SEALs are great at killing people and blowing things up, they can’t do anything they put their mind too, despite all their PR to the contrary.
Because in some cases, like acting, actual talent is required.
The correct answer is to first find a SEAL who can act, and then go ahead with your project.
Out of all the teams, there might be one, or as many as five, who could pull it off. Acting well is a rare talent. Multiplied by someone also making it into the SEALs, you might as well try buying lottery tickets for a quicker payoff.
Ice-T (Tracy Lauren Marrow) is a successful actor, musician, criminal, and Army Ranger. There are probably others.
> want to wreck what you love
The BBC seems intent on destroying Pratchett’s Discworld books with their “The Watch” TV series. And what they’re doing to Poirot this time around. Or James Bond. Or Hollywood’s “re-imagining” Perry Mason as an alcoholic loser.
What Amazon did to Without Remorse is akin to what Paul Verhoeven did to Starship Troopers:
Film a completely different movie, label some characters with names from the book, slap the name of the book on it, and call it good.
I tried to watch WR. I put on my eyepatch and acquired it from the Bay, and I was able to make it to the scene with the female OIC of a SEAL platoon (like THATs ever gonna happen,) where I turned it off and deleted it.
All- Thanks for the comments. Aesop is correct, but the guys got to have ‘FUN’, especially the SWCCs… That scene was shot with ‘live’ ammo and remote cameras! LOL
I have vowed to NEVER read another Jack Reacher novel. The Leftist, woke BS has been apparent off & on over the years. When I got to the major plot element of RUSSIANS doing a computer hack on our Presidential election, well I had enough! It is so obvious that publishing is as corrupt as Hollywood & DC.