Patriot Games

I'm so used to Patriot Games, having seen it numerous times, that I can hardly "see" it anymore. To put it on the VCR is like putting on mood music, where you may not hear every note but still catch the general ambience. The comparison is appropriate because Patriot Games is a movie marked by signifiers, yet without real depth - a straight-up action movie which relies more on connotations than insight for its effect. Still, I like the retrospectively more classical style of the '92 film, and find its details, however superficial, evoke an enjoyable mood. Take the ubiquitous Irish pubs, thick accents, and ethereal Celtic music (which, along with the draconian anti-IRA perspective of the film, so incensed Variety film critic Joseph McBride that he wrote a scathing review - and was apparently fired from the publication as a result!). They are little more than associative signposts, but they work - if the film has any soul, it's borrowed, but I prefer borrowed soul to no soul and miss the days when Hollywood films - however superficially - bartered in such.

The very straightforwardness of Patriot Games - the way it embodies so many action films cliches without really transcending them - is part of its charm. Everything about it influenced countless home video-shot, ketchup-splattered action movies when my friends and I were kids - the villain so irredeemably nasty that you naturally cast yourself as him, the treacherous supposed good guy who shoots a fellow anonymous agent, the bad guys who don't bat an eye when killing their own. The attempts at gravity only add to the fun. There's the standard Harrison Ford beleaguered family man persona (a friend tells me that on "Family Guy," they once hypothesized a Ford movie in which he spent the whole film running up to random people on the street, grabbing them by the collar and desperately growling, "I want my family back!"). Also said actor's entirely rote facial expressions of sorrow and furrowed-brow intensity as he doggedly tackles terrorists and protects his family (the moment when he screams "Get down!" was looped over and over again, and combined with a high-pitched Mariah Carey note and a Bush 41 bon mot, in a hilarious and suprisingly catchy experimental music video I saw years ago - and haven't been able to find online since). Of course, even Ford's narrow collection of trademark tics seems versatile stacked up next to Sean Bean's admittedly enjoyable perpetual scowl (that face only lights up - briefly - when dispatching someone) and Anne Archer's eye-gleaming wry smile...which remains her only expression for the entirety of the film's two hours. In fact, it's the precocious Thora Birch who gives the most well-rounded performance in the movie.

In other words, the dramatic elements are only there as ingredients in the stew - and while audiences and creators are both in on that particular joke (though one at times suspects Tom Clancy might not be), neither one drops the poker face. Which makes the film both more palatable in this tired age of all-knowing postmodernism, and still residually effective - again with the point about borrowed soul. I think I like it more when a mainstream film "plays the game" than when it tries to have it both ways, as a commercial product and a comment on its own nature. There are exceptions to the rule, sure, but there's something a bit stale about the movie that's junk, knows its junk, and expects more respect due to its knowledge. The quality I speak of isn't camp exactly - that I appreciate, in just the right doses (like with Jon Voight's performance in Anaconda). It's less good-natured than that and, coupled with the cramped, flatter aesthetic of today's Bourne-style actioners - as if they've given up with trying to tap into the viewers' imaginations, however un-subtly - makes a viewing of Patriot Games still refreshing (and the revival of this mentality, in a movie like last year's Taken all the more so). Sometimes I think that the "standard" for action films should be the early 90s aesthetic, one which can carry the film probably more than it deserves (the same is true, for most other types of films, of the 30s "look", but that's a subject for another post, another day). Nostalgia perhaps but, hey, indulge me...