I quite like much of this Jack Ryan flick and Ben does pretty well in the title role. However, if you think that this movie came out in the same year as The Bourne Identity, you can really get a sense of what it could have achieved with a better script and a different focus on the direction.

Everyone seemed to do well with what was given to them, but the story never really soars. It chugs along, without any real surprises, and delivers the anticlimactic ending we all knew was coming from half way in.

Despite that, it was enjoyable and passed the time without annoying me too much.

I would have liked either more espionage and intrigue, or…

Jack Ryan has never quite become the great cinematic hero I imagine Tom Clancy wanted for his most famous creation. Harrison Ford didn't quite nail him and nor, it's arguable, does Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears - despite giving it a pretty good shot. Though not without it's flaws, Phil Alden Robinson's adaptation is actually quite decent - yet it never really raises its game beyond the middle, from acting, directing or script. It never quite blossoms into perhaps what it wanted to be, perhaps could have been.

In a decade of reboots, this is Ryan Begins - if Ford's Jack was a seasoned veteran, Affleck's is a boy scout in every sense of the word who…

A cabal of well-respected mitteleuropeans are secret nazis bent on resurrecting a more tenacious reich. When one of their own voices his reservations a burly east german chokes the life out of him with his own scarf while the rest watch indifferently, careful not to betray any sympathetic emotion lest the german turn his murderous intentions in their direction. Their plan is to create the conditions for a putsch-by-proxy through nuclear subterfuge. The central nazi's true allegiances are revealed as he's giving a talk to various naive political types. The camera zooms in on his gold watch, which he has taken off and placed sidelong on the lectern. A lone swastika has been engraved on the backplate. The symbol, recessed…