Friday, January 18, 2008
The Hunt for Red October
***** The Hunt for Red October. Action/adventure.
Directed by: John McTiernan.
Starring: Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Sam Neill
I watched this in bits and pieces on VHS while exercising. Since I've seen it several times, I didn't miss anything, and it's good enough that it kept my mind off the exercise--which was the point.
It's hard to believe this movie is 17 years old--as old as Curran. The Hunt for Red October is old enough to be considered a classic, and I think it is.
Set near the end of the cold war, the Soviet Union's legendary submarine commander, Captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) has taken the Soviet fleet's newest, most advanced submarine, the Red October, and is on his way to the U.S. coastline... to defect, as CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) suspects, or to attack, as the Soviet ambassador (Joss Ackland) suggests?
It's a tense, exciting game of cat and mouse with Ryan convincing U.S. submarine commander Bart Mancuso (Scott Glenn) to give Ramius the benefit of the doubt, and both submarines eluding the entire Soviet fleet.
This is the first of the movies based on Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series, and I'm pretty sure I saw it before I read the book. I'd venture to say it's also the best of the films, but then it's been quite a while since I've watched the others, so maybe having this one freshly in my mind is coloring my opinion.
I truly don't have any complaints whatsoever about this movie--I loved the pacing and the action, and the performances. The balance between humor, drama, and suspense was just right. The extraordinary feats of both eluding and fooling the Soviet fleet might be exaggerated, but that's part of this whole genre, and wasn't too much.
One of my all-time favorites.
Categories: Movies, 5stars, ActionAdventure
Labels: 5 stars, action, Movies
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