Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
So the first 2014 movie I saw in 2014 was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Took me a while. Even by the standards of January/February movies, this year has been off to a pretty shabby start. Not many movies I wanted to see, not many new movies coming out that I was anticipating seeing, so I could keep shoving this aside in favor of other things. I enjoyed it. For one, I like Chris Pine very much. He has "it," that special movie star quality. He radiates charisma and likability, much like Denzel Washington over the course of his entire career (the two of them together in Unstoppable is a casting coup central to an excellent movie), or Tom Cruise twenty or thirty years ago, or Ryan Gosling when he doesn't do bad indie movies. He is very Chris Pine here! I have a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh. Oh, he's not one of the great directors of the past thirty years, but his Dead Again was a movie I liked enough to see twice, he's done some good Shakespeare movies, he...