Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

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Movies about compliance officers are few and far between. It may surprise you to find Chris Pine playing that role in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Jack Ryan is the protagonist in Tom Clancy’s cold war thrillers. I read most of his books back in the 1980s. They were so cold war based I wondered how the story telling would work in the current era where national security is focused more on anti-terrorism. I wonder no more.

Jack Ryan has been through many good actors: Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. This time its Chris Pine rebooting the character. Ryan joins the Marine Corps after 9/11 interrupts his college career. He’s recruited by Kevin Costner to work on terrorist financing. He goes back to school to finish his PhD in economics and goes to work undercover on Wall Street.

He ends up as a compliance officer at a big Wall Street firm. Of course his role is to look for suspicious activity.

“I’m a compliance officer, I do everything by myself.”

He spots some suspicious activity with a Russian business partner. That moves him from analyst to operative. A compliance officer with a gun. Shoot outs and car chases ensue.

The movie is mediocre. It’s not horrible, just bland. But make your spouse sit through it and maybe, just maybe, he or she will raise an eyebrow, wondering if you are actually an undercover operative.

Margin Call

With the announcement of the Oscar nominees, try watching Margin Call to combine movie watching and compliance. Margin Call received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

The movie sets Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Simon Baker as the key players at an investment firm during the earliest hours of the 2008 financial crisis.

Tucci is the head of risk management for the mortgage trading desk, but gets laid-off in the first few minutes of the film. On his way out, he hands an unfinished project to a low-level risk analyst to find the problem. He finds it and it’s big. The holdings on the mortgage desk could lead to the downfall of the firm. that leaves it up to the firm’s employees on whether to save the firm at the risk of fleecing millions of investors.

Unlike Inside Job, Margin Call does not paint the characters as evil, mustache-twirling, robber barons. They’re humans staring at the face of a monumental choice. One choice is to hold and likely bankrupt the company. The other is to sell the garbage and likely being painted as a bad guy. They’re up all night thinking about the problem and trying to find a way out. Dawn comes and they all need to make choices.