Patriot Games

People — even me — like to bag on movies that rely on tropes, because tropes are often used as a lazy crutch by hack writers. But the truth is that most everything in a movie is a trope, and many of the best movies ever are laden with them. The Princess Bride, which is in my top 10 movies of all time and is unimpeachably flawless, is laden with tropes: mysterious stranger, damsel in distress, former rogue trying to redeem himself, and so on. I love a lot of slashers, and they’re dependent on tropes. It isn’t IF a movie uses tropes, but HOW it uses them. They can be used well and you never care, or they can be all that is propping up an otherwise rickety piece of garbage movie. Patriot Games is that third rail. It uses the tropes, and doesn’t do anything spectacular with them, but it also isn’t keeping a dying movie on life support. It’s a simple, straight forward movie, with no aspirations to color outside the lines. Family driven revenge plot? Yup. Retired law enforcement brought back in on a case that impacts him? Yup. Showdown in the rain? Yup. False “we got him” moments? Yup. Patriot Games makes no attempt to deviate from the formula. But it also has no ambition to do so. Not out of sheer laziness, but because that’s just what it is. This is a metronome of a movie, steady in its beat, never wavering up or down, never knowing that there is anything outside the beat. It doesn’t lack the ability to go outside the beat, because all it knows is the beat. And in that regard, it’s fine. You can’t not like Harrison Ford, and while Sean Bean isn’t given a mile of depth, he also doesn’t need it. He’s a man driven by principles, and in this case, his principles of fighting for a free Northern Ireland become overshadowed by his brother dying in the fight. That’s good enough. The action is good, the plot is easy to follow, everything works. Nothing is going to blow anybody away, but it also isn’t trying to do that. It’s just trying to give the viewer a good movie and nothing more, and it does that, and I’m okay with that.