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My favorite is The Hunt for Red October.........and of course Alec Baldwin is my favorite actor to portray him.

"Clear and Present Danger", with Harrison Ford of course.

(Honorable mention to Leslie Nielsen in "Wrongfully Accused", although not technically Jack Ryan)

I'd go for Alec Baldwin and Hunt for Red October

(I am pretty sure it was called "Hunt for Red October" instead of "The..."

man i love Jack Ryan movies

I also love it when in the books he finally becomes the President Of the united states of America

"Executive Orders" or "The Bear and the Dragon"? I never read the books, I'm just familiar with the "saga".

It's a shame because I think that "Sum" kind of closed the door on any more book to movie adaptations.

Patriot Games/ H Ford

Mine to.I dont understand why they wont make a Cardinal of the kremlin or Red Storm Rising movie.

I'm reading Cardinal it's a great one, I'm gonna buy em all

oh for the movies, ALec Baldwin is JAck RYAN hen it comes to film. I dont think any of the other movies match up to Hunt for REd October

Patriot Games - Harrison Ford

Harrison Ford I think... Alec Baldwin was great too.
The role didn't actually suit to Affleck's style

I think Affleck was the worst person they could have possibly chose to play Jack...........I think Sum of All Fears is a good movie, just could have done a better casting job.

I've read a lot of the books and I've always pictured him to look like Sam Neill.

oh and Fire...........the movie is called "The Hunt for Red October"........just so you know.

Ditto. And I don't know if they were real stingy on continuity, but casting a 30 something in the role of a 50 something doesn't quite make for a smooth transaction.

On a side note, I had absolutely no idea that "Hunt" was a Jack Ryan movie, and worse yet, I never got a chance to see it. I'm ashamed.

Cinemaddiction..........you pointed out one of my biggest gripes about Sum of all Fears. They didn't cast Affleck to play a 50 something.......it's like they started a new saga.

In Sum of all Fears Jack Ryan is a young guy who has only been with the CIA for 18 months. He has just started dating his future wife. His future wife isn't even a doctor yet, she is still interning at a local hospital.

The movie is however set in the present (2002). This means it's not a prequel for if it were, it would have been set in the 70s. They basically took the character of Jack Ryan and started a new saga about him.......from the beginning, ignoring the other three previous movies.

I watched all four movies in the order they were produced. This is probably why I'm so partial to The Hunt for Red October. In The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan is just an average CIA analyst. He works a desk job. He is the one who proposes that the Red October isn't actually going to attack....but that the captain simply wants to defect. This leads the brass to say, "okay Jack, since it's your theory......you go make contact with the sub and find out for sure".......

This was my first introduction to the character. The way Jack Ryan is portrayed in this movie is how I knew the character to be. He was just a desk jocky sent out into the field. When Patriot Games came along......they casted a much older Harrison Ford to play the character and gave the character a lot more balls. The Jack Ryan in Red October wouldn't have just jumped into a gunfight with terrorists to save the cousin of the Queen. He was a desk jocky. He would have wet himself in the situation.

They changed the character so much from Red October to Patriot Games it isn't funny. Then Clear and Present Danger comes along.......by the end of that movie Ryan is going into South America to single handedly rescue service men left behind? Not the CIA analyist I know. I love Harrison Ford as an actor and I think he did a great job on both movies..........my problem lies in the change the put upon the character of Jack Ryan. All of a sudden instead of a pencil pushing geek who analyzes data for the CIA we have a chock full of machismo bad ass who doesn't hesitate to jump into dangerous situations, even when uncalled for.

You really need to watch Red October. It is just so great....you will imediately notice how different the character was.

P.S. You mentioned that Affleck should have been playing a 50 year old.........incorrect. They had Harrison Ford playing a guy in his late thirties in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. In Red October, Jack Ryan is in his early thirties........his daughter is 3 years old. Five or Six years pass between it and Patriot Games.......all of a sudden we've got a 50 year old guy playing the character.

Yup, Sum of All Fears is absolurtely in a seperate continuity.

And Evil Dead, I have to very much disagree with you. Ryan might moan about being put on a field job when his career is analysis, but you make him out to be a pure bookworm.

This is not true- when someone protests as much in the film, his ex-Marine background is pointed out. His evolution back into action hero is taken from the books. In HFRO, he was still a tough guy, he just THOUGHT he would not need to dot hat kind of thing any more.

think ush is right on this one

"And Evil Dead, I have to very much disagree with you. Ryan might moan about being put on a field job when his career is analysis, but you make him out to be a pure bookworm."


I wouldn't know Ush........I've never read any of the books. All I know of Jack Ryan are the film adaptations focused on his character. In The Hunt for Red October....Ryan is not a hero. He was a marine......nothing special, who had gotten injured and could no longer be a marine.....so he went to the C.I.A.

The character may be developed quite differently in the books.......I don't know........since we are only talking about the Ryan movies, any insight contained in the novels is irrelevant.

In The Hunt for Red October Jack Ryan is in no way, shape or form made out to be a hero. He is an ex-marine who now holds down a desk for a living. The only brave act Jack does the entire film (before the end) is when he does the helicopter to sub transfer. Even then he did not do it because he was brave......he did it because he believed so strongly that the October was going to surrender he did not want it to be shot down and lost w/o the U.S. learning the secrets of it's propulsion system. He had no choice......he had to jump. The end is very much like this........when he has to go after the rogue cook who's shooting at them. Nobody else could do it.....they all had jobs to do. Ryan being the only one who didn't know how to operate the submarine, he had to go get the guy with the gun. Nowhere in the movie is he made out to be a former hero nor a present hero.

if he was a marine he will have had serious combat training, even if he got injured he wouldn't have forgotten it

and the books are 10x better than the movies.

You're probably right.........books are always better than the film adaptations. There medium of film is rather restricting where as books can take the time to draw out a grand story with great character development.

In the film it states that Ryan was a marine for a very short time before being injured. He wasn't in combat.......he had basically gone through the marine training. This in no way makes somebody a hero. I know several current marines who have been marines for a long time that wouldn't just randomly jump in to a gunfight with several masked hooligans.....much less jump into a gunfight unarmed ala the beginning of Patriot Games. They sure as hell aren't going to be going solo into South America to rescue a few soldiers single handedly..........

Face it.........they took the character of Jack Ryan in Red October and did a complete 180 for Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. They brought the character back a little bit in Sum of All Fears........the Jack Ryan in the last film is most like the Jack Ryan in the first film.

Well, I still have to disagree with you. The whole thing about talking about him being an ex-marine was supposed to demonstrate on that film that this guy was no wimp.

Patriot Games starts with him doing soimething by instinct and then he just gets more and more drawn in. Had Alec not turned down the role he would have done the exact same things, and I really do not see a huge difference in character- simply in actions.

same here if you read the books on which the movies are based you will notice that it goes far slowly, ryan seriously dislikes field work, he doesn't do it often but this doesn't mean he sucks at it

Fire........we're not talking about books here. Grasp it. We're talking about 4 specific movies. Killer MOVIES forums....not killer books forums. I bet all the Jack Ryan novels are great........but that no way reflects on what is presented in these four particular movies. Different medium, different audience and different interpretations of the character.

nobody said he sucked at field work......actually in both The Hunt for Red October and The Sum of All Fears we are given the impression that this is the very first time Jack has ever been in the field, not at his desk.

Well Evil Dead the movies are based on the BOOKS.
you are complaining about something that absolutely makes no sense and the only reason it makes no sense to you is because you didn't read the books.
well if it would be the first time ever he did something like that he'd suck at it, but he doesn't why? because he was a marine.

Patriot Games

"you are complaining about something that absolutely makes no sense and the only reason it makes no sense to you is because you didn't read the books"

exactly........so you are now admitting that the character is portrayed differently in the movies, but not in the books........but if I had read the books then I wouldn't think the character had changed. Game, Set, Match.

Glad to see Red October is now tied for first.......great flick

I didn't know this was a competition and I don't remember ever saying that the character was portrayed the same in the books as in the movies.

every character portrayed in both a book and a movie will be portrayed differently

If you mean that I said his character behaves differently in the different movies well ofc. It does but I always stated that wasn't unlogical certainly not if you have read the books. In the movies it might look like quite a sudden change from one movie to another but in the books it goes far more slowly. And in the end after you have read almost all of them you will see that ryan really isn't much of an action here.

Now you are saying that the character did indeed change between the first and second movies...........before you were agreeing with Ush that the character was the exact same. Which one is it?