Without Remorse

Year 15, Day 82 - 3/23/23 - Movie #4,383

BEFORE: Michael B. Jordan carries over from "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", and I've set my sights on Easter, just 17 movies away.  I've got to look further ahead than that, though, past Mother's Day even, because there could be a film that's droppable from the April chain that could be needed as a valuable link in May or June - that's been the pattern lately, like with "The Weight of Water", so if that's happening again, I want to know about it NOW so I can drop it from the April schedule and move it.  I've got three films planned for Mother's Day, and the last one links to only three other films, one of which is "The Pale Blue Eye", currently set for the first week of April.  But if I need it to connect Mother's Day to Memorial Day or Father's Day, I've got to work that out now, before I watch it and I can't move it. 

It's Day 23 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, just 8 days left after today, and today's themes are "'Til Death Do Us Part" (before 8 pm) and "Coming of Age" (8 pm and after).  Here's the line-up: 

10:30 am "That Uncertain Feeling" (1941)

12:15 pm "My Favorite Wife" (1940)

2:00 pm "The Gay Divorcee" (1934)

4:00 pm "High Society" (1956)

6:00 pm "Period of Adjustment" (1962)

8:00 pm "The Yearling" (1946)

10:15 pm "Splendor in the Grass" (1961)

12:30 am "The 400 Blows" (1959)

2:30 am "Diner" (1982)

4:30 am "Metropolitan" (1990)

I've seen five of these: "My Favorite Wife", "The Gay Divorcee", "High Society", "Splendor in the Grass" and "Diner", so that's a push for sure. 5 out of 10 takes me to 118 seen out of 262, so holding at 45%

THE PLOT: An elite Navy SEAL goes on a path to avenge his wife's murder, only to find himself inside of a larger conspiracy. 

AFTER: Well, this one's sort of a cut above the average "military mission" film - umm, I think? Honestly, I'm finding it more and more difficult to be objective about these things.  Maybe I need like a week off, I've been moving at this pace for over 14 years now, and sometimes I no longer know which end is up when it comes to movies now. If it's not a Marvel or Star Wars or other "event" movie, it sometimes means I'm watching the film just because it "fits", and come on, what kind of psycho maniac DOES that?  Other people seem to get along fine by making "random" decisions over whether to watch a movie or not, and that hasn't been the way I've lived my life for a long time now.  And there are so many movies out there, how do normal people even decide which ones to watch, out of the thousands available to them?  They just kind of wing it?  They don't have a system?  They don't spend hours moving cast lists around to plan out the next three months of their movie viewing?  That seems so CRAZY to me - but I think maybe I'm the crazier one in the end.  

But I take comfort in the fact that I've surrounded myself with other movie-centric people, and sometimes, when I confide in other people that I have a system, and what it's based on, some of them do say, "Huh, that's interesting!" and then I know I've confessed my secret to the right person.  Like if you figured out a better eating pattern, something that made more sense than three meals a day, you'd want to share it with people, right?  Or if your system involved eating breakfast for dinner and that felt like a better way to organize your food intake, sure, you'd want to tell other people and get them on board - but most people are still going to continue to eat omelettes and pancakes in the morning, it's too ingrained into their routines.  But then, if you find another person who also enjoys breakfast food in the evening as you do, you're going to want to hang out with that person, maybe you'll even marry that person, stranger things have happened.  So to other people, watching a film that I'm not all that into JUST because it's got Michael B. Jordan in it, and it helps me land my Easter film on Easter, it might seem a little crazy.  So I keep hoping I'll find other people who "get" it. 

The "revenge" angle is pretty standard - from Batman's parents to John Wick's dog.  That's here, too, as a team of assassins sneaks into the house of John Kelly, a Navy SEAL, shoots him and kills his pregnant wife because he was part of an rescue operation in Syria to rescue a CIA operative, whose captors turned out to be not Syrians, but Russians.  Kelly is shot but he survives, other members of his team weren't so "lucky". But the CIA and the Department of Defense refuse to investigate the murders, even though news of the foreign attack on U.S. soil was leaked to the media.  

This leads Kelly to follow his only lead, tracking down the Russian diplomat who issued passports to the hitmen, but then what Kelly does to him to get the name of the only surviving hitman, well, it isn't very nice. Or legal. Kelly is sent to prison, but is able to trade the information he got about the hit squad to gain not only release from prison, but a spot on the covert team being sent to Russia to find the last assassin.  OK, technically it's a temporary release from prison, Kelly will either die on the mission or he'll serve out the rest of his sentence if he returns alive.  NITPICK POINT: Are those the only two options?  Once Kelly gets released from prison, what's to prevent him from just running off and starting a new life somewhere else?  Oh, right, the revenge thing.  

This comes along at an interesting time for news - just last week, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, over his deportation and transfer of children during the invasion of Ukraine. Yeah, that sounds like a war crime, but it's doubtful that he'll ever stand trial for it, because that would mean somehow getting somebody into Russia to arrest him - hmm, that sounds like it might make for an interesting movie plot, no?  "Seal Team Seven"?  "Breaking Vlad"?  "Putin His Place"?  OK, we'll keep working on the title - but some ambitious Hollywood screenwriter is getting inspired RIGHT NOW, I'll wager.  Then there's a part in this movie where the team of Navy SEALS is going to parachute into Russia from a plane disguised as a commercial airliner going from Germany to Alaska via, you know, the scenic route right over Murmansk.  And this reminds me about the news story about the Russian jet that crashed into an American drone.  But nobody's asking how we can complain about Chinese balloons in U.S. air space, when we've got drones over Russia doing, umm, what, exactly?  

Anyway that's neither here nor there.  Our hero and his team track down the fourth hitman in Murmansk, only they find out he's not the mastermind they think he is, he's just a pawn in the grand scheme of things.  But he's a pawn that's willing to blow himself up, and he was the bait to draw the Americans into the crossfire of a couple snipers in the nearby buildings.  After a few team members are shot, Kelly stays behind on the roof to lay down cover fire while the rest of the team escapes, then he basically takes on the whole Russian army himself, but comes out on top, steals a police uniform and an ambulance and makes it out alive - barely.  Thankfully nobody in this Russian city wonders why a cop is driving an ambulance, or gets freaked out by seeing their very first African-American person. 

After all that trouble to stay alive, then the best plan to figure out the real mastermind is to fake Kelly's death, and allow him to function as a "ghost". Hmm, let's think, who might benefit from another Cold War starting up between the U.S. and Russia?  Pretty much everybody, if you think about it - the United States are more United when there's a common enemy, whether that's Russia or Iraq or Germany.  If we don't have that, then we tend to turn on each other and we fight over things like abortion or gun control or gay rights or whether the toilet paper should come off the roll from the top or the bottom, and then before you know it, there's another Civil War going on.  The economy does better when there's a war on, too - the government ramps up production on tanks and missiles and submarines and then inflation and unemployment go down, and things get really good for a while, except for all the dying and rationing and living in fear of nuclear war. I personally thought the U.S. spent about 20 years too long in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the end, nobody really listens to me.  About a month after 9/11 I realized there would be a war, because the hardest thing to do in response would be NOTHING, and I just didn't think President Cheney was capable of that.  (Cheney's companies got really rich off the 2nd Gulf War, I'm still waiting for someone to call shenanigans on that...not likely to happen though.)

Anyway, what's really hard to believe here is that ONE MAN would be central to all three operations seen in the film - the Syrian hostage rescue, the Murmansk invasion, and then the eventual undercover work to locate the mastermind behind it all.  But if you can turn off that logical rational part of your brain that rails against coincidence, then this could be an enjoyable film, just a bit hard to believe.  The Tom Clancy book this is based on came out in 1993, and you'd think if it took 28 years to turn it into a movie, the whole political landscape might have changed in the interim, but this seems surprisingly relevant and in step with current politics.  (There were substantial changes made turning this into a movie, the book was apparently set during the Vietnam War, and that's just the start...).  Most likely there will be a sequel, made on a tighter schedule than this one. 

Also starring Jodie Turner-Smith (last seen in "Lemon"), Jamie Bell (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Lauren London, Jacob Scipio (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Todd Lasance, Jack Kesy (last seen in "Death Wish" (2018)), Lucy Russell (last seen in "Judy"), Cam Gigandet (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Luke Mitchell, Artjom Gilz, Brett Gelman (last seen in "Like Father"), Merab Ninidze (last seen in "The Courier"), Alexander Terentyev (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Candyman" (2021)), Rae Lim (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Angus McGruther, Conor Boru, Michael Akinsulire, James Ballanger, Sam Coulson (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), George Asprey (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Yolette Thomas, Rich Graff, Rauand Taleb.

RATING: 6 out of 10 smoke grenades