Without Remorse

So this was sorta lost in the Super Bowl Alexa ad, but look at the side of the bus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAmIyrF4r-o&ab_channel=DannyRodgersKul

Based on the novel by Tom Clancy. It will have had to be updated, because I imagine they didn’t do a period piece. Screenwriter is Taylor Sheridan(!!!) Goddamnit, I’m in.

“Things are getting way too wet around here.”

They certainly got away with one there.

Alexa, lights up! Lights up!

By the way, where is the Superbowl ad thread for this year? This Alexa ad was the best one I’ve seen so far.

Ask and someone bored at work shall make ye receive.

Thank you kindly, sir! I shall begin reading and posting in your find thread forthwith!

Looks like they changed basically everything from the original story, except the woman getting fridged.

I’m more keen on the second part which I understand is Rainbow 6?

This is now live.

Initial thoughts early on is that they chose to update it to modern times rather than the 1970s, but it is distracting that all the SEAL team members are named after people who are most certainly not SEAL team members in the novels. That’s unncessary.

Didn’t love it. Like a Tom Clancy novel, it had some okay action surrounded by terrible writing. The main actors weren’t great, something about it felt very TV albeit expensive and shot in ultra widescreen to hide that. There is a brief mid credit scene that does what you can probably guess it does.

Oh, yeah, it’s really terrible.

But I object. Clancy wasn’t a wordsmith, and “Japanese sausage” is one of the worst crimes ever committed to prose, but the dude could still write a goddamn potboiler like few others. There’s a point in most Clancy novels, usually with a few hundred pages left, where you cannot put the book down and are committed to finishing it to find the ending. He spends hundreds of pages building up the tension and moving a dozen of pieces into place, and then he unloads.

This movie has absolutely none of that. It doesn’t even resemble Without Remorse in the slightest. It’s horribly written, everything feels rushed, I have no idea who a lot of the secondary characters are and don’t care for them, and it’s stupid. The only thing it has in common with Clancy is it sprinkles some character names around.

What a disappointment. Taylor Sheridan wrote this? The director also did the great Italian crime movie Gomorrah. What a disappointment.

Yeah, I’m about an hour in and I took a break. I’m not sure if I’ll get back to it.

You know how Amazon Prime has the X-Ray feature with little info tidbits?

I shit you not, this is one of them:

“The plot has nothing to do with the novel, with the exception that John Clark was a Navy Seal. The catalyst in the book is that Clark secretly goes after the drug lords that killed his girlfriend, while at the same time, helping government rescue POWs.”

I love the honesty. And that second part sounds like it would make a helluva great movie.

Yeah, maybe this is a dumb distinction… I will give Clancy credit for a page turning plot (except when it’s like Executive Orders and the 23,000 pages gets in the way of that). But it made my eyes and head hurt reading the actual writing and I often felt dumber after encountering his prose. And yeah, was disappointed when I saw Sheridan as a writer on this.

I was interested, but it looks like it’s not a movie but a 5-season (so far?) series? The book had an interesting idea behind it but I found it dreadful reading, just endless dry reportage of newspaper articles and no real through line. I couldn’t finish it.

There is nothing to link the novel, as pedestrian as that was compared to Tom Clancy’s other works, to this rather sub-par movie apart from the names of some characters.

I’m not hard to please, but it was a real effort to get through it, hoping that it would get better. When the credits rolled I apologised to my wife for wasting her time.

This was my experience as well (fortunately my wife was spared). It was just kinda boring? Like I love a good fun dumb action movie. But this was just dumb.

You don’t think putting Michael B Jordan’s face on new copies of the paperback is a sufficient narrative connect?