Jack Ryan (Ford) is now the acting Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA after his friend and mentor Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) is diagnosed with cancer and dies. His first major assignment is quite a doozy: after a friend of the Presidents (Donald Moffat) is killed, Ryan has to look into Columbian Cartels. Ryan is able to get the money from Congress to keep the CIA’s Columbian operations going only after promising that no covert operations or military actions will occur on Columbian soil. Unbeknownst to Ryan, President Bennett has asked his National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harris Yulin), to ask CIA Director of Operations Robert Ritter (Henry Czerny) to assemble a team to operate in Columbia and destroy the cartels.
Ritter asks veteran field operative John Clark (Willem Dafoe) to put together a team capable of handling the black-ops assignment. Clark gathers marine sniper Domingo Chavez (Raymond Cruz) and others as part of his secretive team and they start destroying rug operations inside Columbia, with Jack Ryan still completely unaware. Cartel head Ernesto Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval) becomes unhappy when the CIA freezes his assets and sends his own operative to infiltrate the F.B.I. Col. Felix Cortez (Joaquim de Almeida) is able to gather intelligence against FBI Director Emil Jacobs (Tom Tammi). Jacobs is killed when he and Ryan visit Columbia to discuss the frozen assets of Escobedo.
After Jacobs is killed, things really heat up. Cutter orders the bombing of Escobedo´s home during a meeting of Cartel heads in retaliation. Everything is still being doing without Ryan’s knowledge, so the explosion was made to look like it was done by another cartel. Eventually, Ryan discovers that it was Cutter and the United States government who handled the bombing of the Escobedo home and that innocent women and children were killed. Col. Cortez finds this out as well and agrees with Cutter to assassinate Escobedo and provide the F.B.I. with enough information to claim some small victories in the war on drugs.
Cutter and Cortez’s agreement comes with a steep price tag. Cutter agrees to give up the location of Clark’s team and allow Cortez to capture and likely, kill them. Ritter must destroy any evidence that the team existed and stop all contact with them immediately. At this point, Ryan finally learns about the team in Columbia and the agreement between Cutter and Cortez. After Ryan confronts Ritter, Ryan heads for Columbia, where Ritter has told Clark that Jack Ryan is the reason he’s lost contact with his men.
Clear and Present Danger is an absolute thrill ride of a film. There is plenty of action and military technology to keep Tom Clancy fans happy and the necessity for Jack Ryan to repeatedly jump into the heart of the action should keep Harrison Ford fans satisfied.
Clear and Present Danger was filmed in very close proximity to Patriot Games (they were essentially shot back-to-back) as both films were created as one big project between filmmakers, stars and studio. This results in a very similar looking transfer on Blu-ray. Paramount has provided English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD sound for this Blu-ray release and p additional mixes in the form of French 5.1 and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital audio. Subtitles are included for English, English SDH, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
There are only two special features. The first, “Behind the Danger – Cast & Crew Interviews” (26:34) gives us some surprisingly bland interviews. The theatrical trailer is provided in high definition.
