You’d Be Without Remorse If You Skipped This Terrible Tom Clancy Adaptation

Michael B. Jordan didn’t need to do Without Remorse. The actor has proven his ability to carry intimate indies and stand out among the effects bonanzas and franchise requirements of AAA blockbusters. The world is his. That makes his gamble to lead and produce a worn-out would-be military franchise-starter even harder to swallow.

There have to be better ways to secure your financial future than Without Remorse, which has next to nothing in common with the 1993 Tom Clancy novel of the same name aside from Clancy’s dad-targeting revenge fantasy nonsense and a central character named John Kelly (Jordan). A plot involving Vietnam, drugs and sex work has been jettisoned in director Stefano Sollima’s film in favor of one that vaguely gestures at America’s baddies du jour, Russia. But whatever might’ve been edgy or exciting about this character has been sandpapered down, stuffed into a laughably formulaic thriller and trafficked solely on star power—and neither Clancy nor Jordan’s name can make it stand out.

John, in this reimagining written by neo-Western staple Taylor Sheridan (with whom Sollima worked on Sicario: Day of the Soldado) and Will Staples (best known for writing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which should be a major clue), is your run-of-the-mill Navy SEAL great at shooting anyone and everyone. He’s duped into shooting the wrong people (Russians instead of Syrians) and, in true cinematic fashion, his pregnant wife is punished for it: Gunned down (along with the pillows covered in blankets next to her, which the professional killers couldn’t tell wasn’t a human in the first of the film’s countless tropes) after a little retirement party straight out of a Mission: Impossible. The film doesn’t return to exploring the dichotomy between civilian life and action movie antics, but it’s at least a bit more compelling to watch how Jordan moves around a residential home than in myriad hazy setpieces.

This tragic home invasion is at least the one part of the film that feels unpredictable or, at the very least, cruelly human enough that the gloom and doom actually affects us rather than bores us with its bland moral and aesthetic greyscale. While action films have been going hard on the revenge rampage lately, when John’s only purpose becomes revenge, the perfunctory plot quickly clouds any of Jordan’s powerful emotions or primal drives with a mess of mystery. It doesn’t help that it’s completely transparent to anyone that’s seen a movie before. Was it truly just those dastardly Russians? Jamie Bell’s cagey CIA suit and the always-suspicious Guy Pearce’s Secretary of Defense all but jump up and down, waving their arms in our slack-jawed faces as they unpack exposition in ugly, empty conference rooms.

Piling on the conspiracies and politics only straps added weight—rather than stakes—to this slogging film, which didn’t need help being a plodding relic. Without urgency or cleverness, the rote narrative sticks a regular soldier into a supersoldier’s story and the result just doesn’t work. By that I mean Jordan’s playing it straight and serious. There are no quips, no knowing winks to the over-the-top action. But there’s a blank shapelessness to John that you mostly find in the kind of militarized superhuman living in these action movies. The film wants to be realistic—gritty, tactical, the kind of movie that tracks its bullet count and yells the proper jargon—but without any of those tricky problems that come with writing with specificity, especially when sticking a halfcocked rogue into real life. One of John’s first moves is to set a car on fire and kill a diplomat and his driver, unprovoked and in plain sight, then—as it’s part of his big plan—trusts the police to not immediately murder him there on the street. If you weren’t sure the movie was living in a fantasy world already, that’s all you need.