What Critics Think of New Tom Clancy Movie

Michael B. Jordan is great in the starring role in Without Remorse, a Tom Clancy thriller directed by Stefano Sollima. The movie itself? Not so much. Those are two common themes from reviewers of the Amazon flick, which is getting a lackluster 45% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some snippets:

• Jordan is "reliably riveting," writes Peter Travers at ABC News. But it's taken decades to get this 1993 novel into print, and the wait was not worth it, he adds. "No knock on serving audiences hungering for an R-rated, red-meat, military thriller. But it should have been better than this." Among other things, the plot has been "sloppily updated" to take place in Syria instead of Vietnam. Still, a sequel looks like a lock. "Just make it more playful next time, please, less grim and perfunctory."

• At the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle zeroes in on what he sees as the main problem: "Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out," he writes. "What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script."
• One of the more scathing reviews come from Alison Willmore at Vulture. "Without Remorse is awful—an incoherently shot, grindingly dull movie in which just about every actor manages to seem miscast," she writes. She places Jordan in that camp, for the record. "He’s too fresh-faced for a character who feels rooted in grizzled anguish, and the movie does him no favors by requiring the character to go off the rails so quickly."
• More forgiving is Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune, who calls the movie a "fairly entertaining origin story." Just don't expect too much. It's "something to kill 100 minutes or so while you're avoiding something else, delivered in an impersonal but not unskillful manner."

(Read more movie reviews.)