Butler's Cinema Scene

“TOM CLANCY’S WITHOUT REMORSE” My rating: C (Amazon Prime)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Critical reaction to Netflix’s “Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” has pretty much centered on the fact that leading man Michael B. Jordan is WAY too talented to be wasted on this sort of superficial action drek.

I cannot argue with that analysis — putting Jordan in this “John Wick”-ish clone is like using a thermonuclear device to get rid of a wasp nest hanging from your eaves.

Yet even mediocre movies can be significant within a larger social context, and “Without Remorse” (a cheesy, generic title) feels like the right film at the right time in our intensifying national discussion about race.

Not that the film overtly addresses race. Outwardly, anyway, it’s color blind. But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to find other stuff going on.

Clancy’s 1993 novel introduced readers to John Kelly, a Navy Seal who in 1970 is sent on a Rambo-is mission to recover an American intelligence officer from a North Vietnamese POW camp. He uncovers a high-level government plot to smuggle heroin into the US in the bodies of slain soldiers and instigates a murderous cleanup spree.

Eventually he’s recruited by the CIA, changes his hame to John Clark, and goes on to recurring appearances in a slew of Ryanverse novels.

Presumably the John Clark of the novels is white. Indeed, during the many years that the film version was in preproduction limbo, white actors like Keanu Reeves and Tom Hardy were considered for the role.

The ultimate choice of a black actor probably had less to do with ulterior motives on the part of the filmmakers than on Jordan’s widespread popularity. He is a draw for audiences of all colors.

Watching the film — which has shed its Vietnam-era trappings and takes place in the present; about all it has in common with the novel is the title — one is struck by its seeming color blindness. No mention is made of Kelly/Clark’s race. He’s an elite fighter, a devoted husband and soon-to-be father. But race doesn’t figure into it.

Or does it? Screenwriters Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples have provided their hero with a commanding officer/best friend/confidant who is also portrayed by an African American. Jodie Turner-Smith plays Commander Karen Greer, who with her closely-cropped hair and tough physicality might have come to the Seals after a stint guarding Wakandan royalty.

The white guys in their Seal unit serve pretty much the same function as the Red Shirts on a “Star Trek” away team. So without making a big deal of it, the film is Afro-Centric.

Moreover, the villains are white. These include members of a Russian hit squad who methodically assassinate Clark’s fellow Seals (Clark’s pregnant wife is a victim of a Russkie raid on their home), a manipulative DoD official (Guy Pearce), and a smug CIA operative (Jamie Bell) who is all too eager to send fighting men out to die on false pretenses.

There is only one moment in “Without Remorse” that suggests racial awareness…and even that bit of dialogue is so carefully parsed that it can be read a couple of ways.

“I’m the one who went to hell and did their dirty work,” Kelly/Clark tells Commander Greer. “We served a country that didn’t love us back. Because we believed in what it could be. We fought for what America could be.”

The “we” he mentions might be black fighting men — remember, he’s talking to another person of color. The America that could be might be one of racial equality.

Or this may just be the lament of a professional soldier who feels he’s gotten a raw deal. After all, a big chunk of the Tom Clancy ethos hovers on his protagonists’ love of country and hatred of bureaucrats.

There’s no point saying much more about this revenge melodrama. The action sequences have been effectively staged by director Stefano Sollima and the technical side is solid.

There are forehead-smacking lapses of common sense (Kelly and his wife live in a modernist glass palace WAY beyond the buying power of a military man) and the conspiracy at the movie’s core is just plain dumb.

The characters — even Jordan’s hero — are maddeningly superficial.

But in its indifferent way “Without Remorse” reflects changing racial attitudes…and perhaps quietly nudges those very attitudes.

| Robert W. Butler