Action Movies Need More Heroes Like Alec Baldwin’s Jack Ryan

Late in The Hunt for Red October, a sweaty Jack Ryan squeezes through a tube. “Ryan, some things here don’t react well to bullets,” he says sardonically, mimicking Soviet sub commander Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery. “Yeah, like me. I don’t react well to bullets.” It’s easy to understand Ryan’s frustration. He began the film a nervous CIA analyst who couldn’t sleep through the turbulence on the overnight flight that brought him from London to Washington. He only intended to relay information from British Intelligence, who learned about a top secret silent propulsion system in the Soviet nuclear submarine called the Red October. Now he’s got to stop a KGB agent from blowing up the nuclear sub.

In short, Jack Ryan is exactly the wrong man to be the lead in a John McTiernan movie. Which is why he’s perfect, especially when played by Alec Baldwin.

The Many Faces of Jack Ryan

“He was physically unremarkable, an inch over six feet, and his average build suffered a little at the waist from a lack of exercise enforced by the miserable English weather. His blue eyes had a deceptively vacant look; he was often lost in thought, his face on autopilot as his mind puzzled through data or research material for his current book. The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest. He had no ambition to celebrity.”

This is not the first time Tom Clancy described Jack Ryan in his 1984 debut novel, The Hunt for Red October. In two earlier passages, we see Ryan put aside concerns that his latest article sounds too academic, so that he can play with his kids. In the preceding passage, the narrator describes Ryan feeling awkward in the suit purchased by his wife.

Nowhere in the book is Ryan described as the type of guy we’d come to know in later movies and especially a streaming TV series: the Hollywood handsome field agent. Which is, of course, the appeal of Clancy’s character. The Ryan of the books is a nerd, a guy who seems in over his head, even when it’s his eighth recorded adventure.

Granted, Clancy’s literary Ryan did join the Marines after graduation, but he was discharged soon thereafter, having badly injured himself during a helicopter crash. Using his CPA license he earned while waiting for deployment, Ryan soon became incredibly wealthy at a young age. He used that wealth to earn six doctoral degrees at Georgetown University, eventually working as a consultant for the CIA. Fantastic as his background certainly is, it’s clearly a different type of power fantasy than those peddled by Commando.

And yet, outside of Baldwin, Ryan tends to be played by square-jawed actors with action credibility. Harrison Ford, McTiernan’s first choice to play Ryan, stepped in for Baldwin in the sequels Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). Ben Affleck played the younger Ryan for the 2002 franchise reboot, The Sum of All Fears, while Chris Pine starred in an even more action-heavy 2014 reboot, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Most recently, John Krasinski starred in four seasons of the Jack Ryan television series, also (you guessed it!) a reboot, and will return for upcoming films.

With each of these iterations, Ryan’s action hero cred gets pushed further and further to the fore. Ford plays Ryan with more gentleness and creakiness than he did the Jack Ryan-ish POTUS in Air Force One, a movie he would make after his Clancy films had run their course. And yet, he carries with him the same star persona that he brought to defining big screen icons like Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Pine, fresh off of playing a butt-kicking Captain Kirk in two Star Trek movies, appears in a tight black shirt and toting a gun on the Shadow Recruit poster. Krasinski continues that look, which is useful as his Ryan straight up performs black-ops missions overseas.

Of the post-Baldwin bunch, only Affleck downplays the heroic elements, as his Ryan also spends most of his time talking in rooms. Yet when his Ryan gets called into action in the movie’s third act, Affleck’s tall frame and cleft chin reminds you more of Daredevil and Batman than a sweaty nerd scared of being shot.

Hence Baldwin’s Ryan isn’t special just because he best embodies the spirit of the Tom Clancy novels. He’s also special because he stands out against most movie action heroes.

Mind Over Muscles

Jack Ryan’s first action scene comes 90 minutes into The Hunt for Red October. Desperate to convince the USS Dallas, the only American ship to have potentially encountered Red October, that Captain Ramius intends to defect and not attack the U.S., Ryan dangles from a barebones chopper, above the choppy waters of the Atlantic where Dallas is surfaced.

McTiernan drops the slick, assured camera movements that mark the rest of the movie for an almost vérité style. The sound of wind and the chopper blades fill the sound track, making most of the dialogue—delivered via radio chatter and military slang—almost incomprehensible. The camera feels out of control as it whips around the chopper and the sub, cutting back to the sailors and the pilots. In the middle of it all is Ryan, hanging from a cord.

Make no mistake, Ryan isn’t helpless. He’s the one who demanded to be flown out in awful weather; he’s the one who made the chopper use its emergency fuel to wait on Dallas‘ arrival; and when the pilot deems the entire thing too risky and tries to pull him back in, Ryan is the one who decides to drop into the ocean, forcing Dallas to use its rescue diver to pull him in.

It’s a heroic moment to be sure, but one very unlike the those of the fictional heroes of Red October‘s day. Throughout the 1980s, chiseled men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme ruled the screen, making even Clint Eastwood—hose Dirty Harry movies pushed the envelope in the 1970s—seem creaky and old. Before helming Red October, McTiernan made Predator in 1987, a movie that builds tension by letting musclebound soldiers played by Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers get torn to shreds by an alien. Bruce Willis may have been a comedy star, and his character John McClane an everyman, when McTiernan made Die Hard in 1988, but he still has a muscle shirt and a machine gun, making him more beefy than the average moviegoer.

In 1990, Baldwin’s most notable feature were his incredible blue eyes, effective when Ryan’s staring down the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs but not in a firefight with a KGB agent. Yet he uses these eyes, along with his slightly embarrassed grin and his constantly rumpled hair, to indicate intelligence, thoughtfulness. Which are exactly the qualities that make Ryan the hero of Red October. He’s in the Atlantic because he’s studied enough Russian naval history to know that Ramius means to defect and that the Soviets are lying when they say he’s going rogue. He’s the only one wary enough to fight to realize that their choices could lead to another world war.

In other words, Baldwin’s Jack Ryan is more of an inaction hero: a man whose strength comes from waiting to consider all other possibilities and trusting on his intellect. He’ll move when he has to but he’s wise enough to realize when that need arises and no sooner.

The Hero for Our Times

By the time The Hunt for Red October hit theaters on March 3, 1990, the Cold War was ending, with the Berlin Wall falling just four months earlier. The movie came out just in time to enshrine Ryan as a hero of the pseudo conflict, at least from the American side, as a U.S. agent smart enough to avoid escalation while embarrassing the Soviets and securing an incredible piece of matériel. Which makes sense, given that the novel went from a piece of fiction published by the small-scale Naval Institute Press to a bestseller thanks to Cold War Warrior Ronald Reagan’s recommendation.

And yet, Ryan’s importance as a heroic book nerd and analyst has only grown, especially outside of its original context and within our current day of particularly dumb and angry hawks. While those in power offer spectacles of terror to justify their unsustainable promises of security, the need for thoughtful heroes grows.

Those heroes will look less and less like the ripped men of the 1980s, as demonstrated by photoshop jobs that put the current president’s face on peak Stallone’s body. Rather it will look like someone who reads books instead of watches streaming influencers, who determines truth through the rigor of the academy not through ideological tests designed to boost engagement.

Those heroes will look a lot like Jack Ryan as played by Alec Baldwin.

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