The War Against Drugs Up Close And Personal-Harrison Ford’s “Clear And Present Danger” (1994)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Clear and Present Danger, starring Harrison Ford, Willem Defoe, based on the suspense novel of the same name by Tom Clancy, 1994  

The concept of “clear and present danger” has a long legal and constitutional pedigree although of late it has been used rather over-abundantly in presidential decisions, great and small. The concept “clear and present danger to the national security interests of the United States” usually invoked on anything from the “war of terror” to classifying documents which should see the light of day in a working democracy. In the film under review the cinematic adaptation of Tom Clancy’s best-seller Clear and Present Danger  the concept is invoked in the pre-9/11 war of drugs which took up a great deal of the political and social air in 1990s.

Here’s the play on this one. A close friend of the President (fill in the blank for a surname from Washington to Trump), a businessman, had been killed along with the rest of his family on a sea-going yacht in what seemed at first like just another bizarre killing spree, maybe drug addled pirates or kill-crazy teenagers looking for kicks on the high seas. No so fast though. Said businessman had serious and close connections with the cocaine-rich drug cartels down in Columbia. Ran a nice little profitable for all concerns laundry business when nobody needed quarters for the washer. To get to the bottom what happened to his friend, and to help his scandal-ridden administration in need of a boost come the next approaching election, the President invoked the “clear and present danger” policy.

That hem haw decision made by indirection rather than strange out since it involved covert operations using American troops triggered two movements-one, setting up a clandestine para-military operation led by John Clark, played by a made for Special Ops roles Willem DaFoe, to smash the drug lords, or create a certain amount of good election winds havoc  and-two, sending acting-Director of Intelligence Doctor Jack Ryan, played by Harrison Ford,  on the trail of the whereabouts of a few hundred million laundered dollars which the fallen President’s friend had been knee deep in turning over.          

Of course in any war, in anything involving drugs and huge sums of money, there is more duplicity, more big career moves and thought of secure private contractor employment after the cheapjack public service by the Administration’s lackeys and the over-the- top drug kings and their confederates than you can shake a stick at from the sabotages of that black-ops operation to working hand-in-hand with a high-ranking officer of one of the cartels. Here’s the beauty of high-end politics-one of the drug lord’s underlings, a seasoned ex-intelligence officer in Cuba now a hired gun for one of the lords offered to make the drug trade reasonable including many photo ops of DEA-types busting big loads in exchange for letting him waste the cartel leaders-and the Administration through the National Security Advisor signed on. Problem: that high-end Special Ops team was going to be left hanging in the wind-cooked with no way back.

That is where our man Jack, straight-shooter Jack, a guy who does not leave his men behind get that straight gets into the act. Like I said there is a Washington-drug lord conspiracy formed to make the President look like he is on top of the war as in any other war-time situation. But it is all a house of cards after the President’s national security advisor brokers a deal with that high-ranking official to kill his boss and take over the operations. Nice, right. Well Jack finds out about this and spends the rest of the film attempting to expose the budding conspiracy while naturally in a suspense thriller dodging bullets at every turn in order to get Clark and whoever was left in the rotting jungles of Columbia. Yeah, even I know you don’t let the guys who you sent on dangerous missions hang in the wind. When Jack figures out the high level of duplicity going all the way to the President (remember fill in the blank for a name) he screams bloody murder before a Congressional oversight committee. Good thing he had old Clark and his men at his back. Pretty good thriller.