Review of Clear and Present Danger

I had read the novel before, so I had high hopes on the film. I was so disappointed. The film not only botches the book quite badly, but has errors of its own :

*** Possible spoilers ****

• The whole point of assembling a special ops team of soldiers from Latino origin, was to make them difficult to identify as US forces. However, they happily yell in clear English on all combat scenes.

• Willem Dafoe as Clark is a TERRIBLE miscast. The character is always depicted as a tall, broad shouldered person. (Liev Schreiber is also a bad choice for the same role on Sum of All Fears).

• Almost all roles on the book are changed beyond recognition : CIA Dep. Dir. Robert Ritter is not the bad guy depicted on the movie; FBI Dir. Jacobs and Agent Murray are both killed on the movie (they are important characters on next novels); on the novel, James Cutter kills himself by walking in front of a bus.

• The soldiers persecution on the jungle seems like a bunch of scared kids running from a gang; the novel depiction of tactics and ambush scenes are FAR superior.

• And of course, the inevitable final up-close-and-personal fight between Ryan and Cortez : guess what, never happened on the book, since Ryan never gets off the Blackhawk rescue helicopter (not the puny Bell from the movie), because he is busy manning a machine gun. It seems that Hollywood thinks that a movie is incomplete without a "heroic" fist fight (the same issue that completely botched the ending of Patriot Games). Originally, Cortez is left alive on the backyard of one of the surviving drug lords : THAT is a punishment!!

In all, the movie not only presents a simplistic plot of bad guy-good guy, but ignores completely a much more complex conspiracy and anti-drug operation. This film had all the ingredients to be just great, but you get just cartoonist bad guys, a couple of good action scenes and a laughable ending.