The same hero from The Hunt for Red October (though without the same actor in the role you'd never know him) is enjoying a working holiday in London with his wife and daughter when a terrorist strike against a cousin of the Royal Family unfolds in front of his and their very eyes. The ex-Marine, ex-CIA agent, and current Professor of History at Annapolis cannot just stand by and spectate, but wades in -- as one of his colleagues will later put it -- "like John Wayne." In the result, he kills one of the terrorists, who happens to have been the younger brother of another of them. From then on, it's personal. Among a hefty armload of gripping scenes, the tightest gripper is quite properly the finale, an episode of quasi-horror-film scariness when the hero's baronial Maryland home, with the power knocked out and the bodyguards dispensed with by a highly improbable double agent, is swarmed over by mantislike frogmen equipped with cyclopean see-in-the-dark goggles: how are they going to get out of it this time? The technology (for which the original novelist, Tom Clancy, is universally renowned whether or not revered) is impressive without being overwhelming -- closer to that of the James Bond books than that of the James Bond movies. (Particularly impressive is the infrared aerial photography, viewed as a sort of video game in the CIA war room, of the assault on a commando training camp in the North African desert.) And there is a visualization of the work of the mind -- the calling up of the subconscious -- that outdoes that maestro of Freudian problem solving, Dario Argento. Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, James Earl Jones, Richard Harris; directed by Phillip Noyce. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.