Despite being well-cast, cleanly-made and luxuriously shiny, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit left me with one prevailing thought as it rolled in the theater: Specifically, we’re 14 years into a new century and I can’t believe I’m still watching spy films where the CIA goes up against the Russians, as if it was 1963 and JFK were still alive. Jack Ryan isn’t so much stale as it is re-heated; Chris Pine is the fourth actor to play writer Tom Clancy’s wonkish hero, a CIA desk-jockey number-cruncher shoved out into the field at great risk when America needs it. Re-booted by Paramount – who, much like the U.S. faced and feared being on the losing end of a ‘missile gap’ with the Soviets in the ‘60s, faces and fears being on the losing end of a franchise gap among the studios – Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit doesn’t update Tom Clancy’s Reagan-era Cold War fantasies to the present day so much as it crams itself into a set of uncomfortable contortions so it can fit into a retro, regressive set of settings and plot devices. There are adequate thrills in it, to be sure; while Branagh needs to move the camera back about 10 feet from all his action sequences and hold his cuts longer, he was also smart enough to hire legendary Second Unit Director Vic Armstrong to help shape the fights, chases and action sequences. And all of Jack Ryan is like that – a handsomely-made movie that could have been better, or at least interesting, with a little massaging.

Chris Pine plays Ryan; we meet him in a flashback to 2001 when he’s napping at Oxford, waking up to tumult and bad news on CNN as the Twin Towers are attacked. (Any suggestion that this is symbolism or commentary — AMERICA SLEPT! — gives screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp far more credit than is deserved …)  A volunteer soldier in the wake of September 11, Ryan’s hurt in a helicopter crash – and then recruited by CIA higher-up Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner, who ironically was approached to play Ryan himself in the late ‘80s).  “I’m with the group in the CIA that makes sure we don’t get hit again,” Harper notes with dour determination, and Ryan’s combination of smarts, stubbornness and drive appeal to him; Ryan goes to work on Wall Street and reports to his superiors occasionally when it’s of interest, unable to tell his girlfriend Cathy (Keira Knightley, with an adequate American accent) of his work.

With what seems like hours of set-up and exposition over, the plot kicks in as Ryan’s position in a major investment firm affords him the perspective to note that Russian business partner Viktor Cheverin (director Branagh, a cold-cured ham here) is clearly about to try and ding the U.S. Dollar in the near-future – specifically combining a massive sell-off of hoarded American currency with a terror attack to create the kind of depression and hyper-inflation that could destroy America. And so Jack is dispatched to Moscow to poke around. Moscow pokes back.

There isn’t a lot to say about the form of Jack Ryan – it’s a standard-issue techno-thriller, right down to the type in the lower left-hand-side of the screen popping up with chirpy digitized sounds so we know where we are at any given globe-trotting moment. At one point, Jack has to sneak into an office to steal files, and we get yet another sequence of a hero watching a progress bar slowly crawl towards completion while armed men approach where he hides with his USB key and you realize, with sadness, that we live in an age when one of the number-one engines to generate suspense in a thriller is data transfer rates.  You can even see where Branagh’s classing up the material knocks it down; when his bad guy threatens Knightley with unspeakable violence through a specific means by describing it at length, you know that any real B-movie filmmaker would have had the villain demonstrate the mechanics on some unlucky minion or underling earlier for show-and-tell purposes.

As for Pine, he’s fine; he brings the same scrappy, never-say-die-even-with-a-fist-in-your-face spirit to Ryan as he does to his Kirk. Pine’s Ryan and Kirk both take way more hits than they hand out but always stagger back up to their feet to stay in the fight; it may be a cliché, but it’s a cliché we like. It’s odd to be writing about Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit – a film that suggests, as these films always do, that our spy services are always resolute, brave and tireless in protecting us from dangers we can’t imagine – the same week as a Lawrence Wright piece in The New Yorker explains precisely how the FBI, CIA and NSA had, between the three agencies, all the information required to stop 9/11 well before it happened … but didn’t, thanks to territoriality, turf wars and simple bureaucracy. With reality like this, the fantasy of Jack Ryan leaping in and out of moving vehicles and jumping between deductions to save us is pleasant; it’s also just a fantasy, sprung from the imagination of 4-F insurance salesman Clancy over 32 years ago. You can sum up both the worst and best thing about Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit in one sentence: Your dad is going to love it.