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One of my all time favorites.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Cleared And Present Danger2 And A Half Out Of 5Clear And Present Danger is a plot driven political thriller about a culmination of all the usual agendas that fuels an act of war, brewing in by the darker forces. Ticking for almost two and a half hours, the overkill sets in early due to its subjective procedure that is not only off-putting but also follows a textbook structure. All the action and chase sequences are nicely shot with amazing sound effects and fine editing amongst all the mind-numbing explosions. The politics and reasonings are justified with no usual flaws which doesn't suggest its excellence but the safe play that it plays. As much as lousy its final act grows the little tactics that used to work in its predecessor fails to upbeat or elevate the momentum as it used to. The writing is overstretched and not elaborative, there is a fine line between them that makers often crosses it unknowingly. The result of such acts can draw a nod out of the audience but fails to impress them. It is short on technical aspects like visual effects, background score and cinematography and neither is its camera work plausible for it to seek attention through it. Ford is bang on his bucks on revisiting his role with amazing supporting cast like Dafoe, Archer and Jones. Noyce; the director has done a decent work on executing the feature but the real culprit is its sloppy script that isn't sincere enough to breed the essential crisp out of the screen. The clean satirical political act and sharp sound effects are the only high points of the feature. Clear And Present Danger is an unstable and out-dated mishap of politics that may be accurately tossed but unfortunately overcooks its outcome.

Tom Clancy's CIA analyst character Jack Ryan not only made an impact on the page, he also made an impact on the big screen as well. In the 1990 smash THE HUTN FOR RED October, as played by Alec Baldwin, he was in a race against time to find out whether a renegade Soviet submarine captain was out to defect to America, or out to launch. Then in 1992's PATRIOT GAMES, Ryan, then portrayed by Harrison Ford, went into action to protect his own family against the machinations of vengeful ultra-violent Irish Republican Army terrorists. And then in 1994, again with Ford more than capably assuming the role, Ryan found himself in a pickle much closer to his job: covert military action related to the ongoing Latin American drug war in CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER.Ford's Jack Ryan is put into action into finding the root causes of why one of the closest friends of the President (Donald Moffatt) was killed on his boat in the Caribbean Sea. As it turns out, the president's dead friend had stolen money from a Colombian drug kingpin (Miguel Sandoval), like six hundred forty million dollars…and change. For Ford, this may seem like a fairly routine matter, as is him having to go to Congress to get authorization to fund the Colombian government's war against drug cartels like Sandoval's. But unbeknownst to him, Moffatt, along with his national security adviser (Harris Yulin) and deputy CIA director (Henry Czerny) have hatched a covert operation called Operation Reciprocity to finish off the drug war on American terms, sending a paramilitary unit commanded by a man named Clark (Willem Dafoe) into the hot zone. More importantly, when his mentor Admiral Greer (James Earl Jones) falls victim to inoperable pancreatic cancer that ultimately kills him, the weight of the world falls on his shoulders. Dafoe's team does score hits against Sandoval's operation; but the end result is a series of horrific acts of retribution, including the killing of an FBI team sent to assist Ford, followed by the capture of Dafoe's men by an associate of Sandoval's (Joaquin De Almeida) out to take over Sandoval's operation.Once Ford makes himself aware of the kind of paramilitary finagling that had been going on behind his back, he becomes a fighter once more—not for just his family, but the truth. This means having not only to go back down to the Colombian war zone to rescue Dafoe and his men, but also having to confront a president who has bent, and maybe even broken the law, for political points, and made decisions that resulted in massive losses of lives.Philip Noyce, who had also directed PATRIOT GAMES, returns to the director's chair for this well made and, at close to two and a half hours, epic action/suspense thriller. Not surprisingly, Ford delivers the kind of performance that could easily be classified as a "thinking man's action hero" as Ryan, acting not on impulse or an urge for explosions of violence, but a vigilant search for the truth. Ultimately, he wonders, exactly what does constitute a "clear and present danger" in the real world? Is it what the president says it is, when it is in the form of drug cartels (who, by the early 2000s, proliferated far closer to the U.S., in rural sections of Mexico)? Or is the real clear and present danger found in a host of decisions merely meant to gain political points? Ford's performance remains the centerpiece of this film, but Sandoval and De Almeida make for a pair of crafty (but non-stereotypical) South American heavies (much of the film was shot in Mexico), and there are also underhanded performances by Yulin and, most especially Czerny, the latter of whom is absolutely oily and corrupt (he would play a similar role only two years later in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE). And when he is not recycling his scores for ALIENS and PATRIOT GAMES, James Horner's score is extremely effective too, veering from typically stirring patriotic Americana to ethnic South American motifs (with pan flutes).Far too many action films from the 1980s onward are all about spectacle, and almost no suspense or substance. But CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER has a lot of those two important things in spades, and still ranks as one of the best films of the action genre during the 1990s.

Though I remember liking this when it opened in August of 1994 and more than Patriot Games but far under The Hunt for Red October and one climactic line ("How DARE YOU, SIR!"), I could not for the life of me recall anything else. That's probably not a good sign for a movie I thought I liked.The first half of this movie plays like a TV movie with a plot a seven year old could follow and the film really doesn't pick up until act 2. Luckily, by then we're invested and totally rooting for John/Jack Ryan. 21 years later and only my 2nd viewing in as many years, I believe it somewhat holds up. Not to mention and comparatively speaking, it blows the other Jack Ryan installments out of the water, with the exception of The Hunt for Red October. Patriot Games, The Sum of all Fears and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit all wither to this film. Oh, and please, guys, five Ryan films, two good and the last one 21 years ago. No more trying. Just move on.

Well, this movie is really surprising because it's really the first time that I see a Hollywood blockbuster adapting without filtering a bestseller in which the famous writer really depicts the pool of sharks at Washington DC and especially in the white house. In short, what triggers a more energetic politic against drug cartels is just the assassination of POTUS friends. This kind of personal revenge is indeed a special way to uphold national interest. As Nixon, POTUS feels he is not bounded by laws or frontiers as he authorizes guerrilla in other country. And he is so cynical that he doesn't order it clearly and when bad news arrive, he would like to put the blame to innocent mans (here, Admiral Greer). This aspect of revealing Washington life would be the trademark in later Clancy novels, always coupled with an armed conflict. Here, i must say that the drug cartel isn't a « prestigious » adversary but a rather boring, dull one. In that, the movie equals the book because I remember to be among the weakest Clancy ever wrote. However, Harrison as the white, honorable hero is always perfect and Dafoe as an experimented veteran is an excellent partner.