Friday's Old Fashioned: The Hunt for Red October (1990)

I had not seen the seminal dad movie “The Hunt for Red October” since I saw it with my dad on home video in the early 90s, and I had forgotten just how much the recent “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” cribbed from it. In John McTiernan’s cinematic adaptation of Tom Clancy’s best-selling book, CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) suspects that when Soviet submarine commander Ramius (Sean Connery) goes rogue with a nigh undetectable new class of underwater warship, he is not seeking to transform the Cold War into a hot one but to defect. Granted three days by the National Security Advisor (Richard Jordan) to prove his theory, Ryan seeks out the Red October in the North Atlantic to confirm its true intent by way of an American submarine by way of an American aircraft carrier just as in the eighth M:I movie, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) seeks a sunken Soviet submarine in the Bering Sea by way of an American submarine by way of an American aircraft carrier. Ethan Hunt, however, skews closer to a superhero, and if subsequent Jack Ryans could skew that way too, I had also forgotten the jocularity of Baldwin’s pace-setting performance, truly playing an ordinary analyst rather than a savior-like agent. And given that Ryan wants to bring home a teddy bear to his daughter as much as he wants to prevent WWIII, no wonder desk bound dads everywhere loved this movie so much.

Clancy’s novel was published in 1984 when the Cold War was still in effect, but by the time the movie was released in March of 1990, the Soviet Union was dissolving. In that way, Ramius defecting, with he and Ryan cast as allies, feels like a premonition more than a hopeful wish, underlining what was playing out in real time. Then again, rewatching this conclusion now, with the pathetic American President kowtowing to a Russian one hellbent on resurrecting a USSR-like empire, if not occasionally outright copying his playbook, colors it in a whole new light. (It’s quite a quirk of history that the Political Commissar aboard the Red October that Ramius is forced to kill to keep his plans quiet is named…Putin.) “The Hunt for Red October” might lay America’s semi-self-inflated role as global peacekeeper on thick, in a way that no doubt would make some cringe, but at a moment when it can feel as if The Great Experiment might be failing, Ryan telling Ramius “welcome to the new world” hit me hard, man. 

That “The Hunt for Red October” lacked real world Cold War overtones upon its release only emphasizes John McTiernan’s supreme command of craft. The screenplay might be laden with exposition, but McTiernan’s frequently moving camera still seems to be telling the story itself by nudging us toward characters who are about to matter and leading us toward details and events about to matter. What the underwater effects lack, meanwhile, is more than made up for in how the action sequences are composed by McTiernan and editors Dennis Virkler and John Write to illustrate how these vessels are merely extensions of the men running them. That’s the true subject of “The Hunt for Red October,” not geopolitics, not even underwater warships; dudes. 

There might not be enough machine gun fire, broken limbs, or dudes thrown through windows to qualify as a Movie for Guys Who Like Movies, but still; McTiernan, his producers, and casting director Amanda Mackey assembled a magnificent stable of dudes. There is Baldwin, of course, at his youngest and frothiest, and there is also Sam Neill as Ramius’s right-hand man exuding the right-hand man loyalty that sends the hearts of assistant coach-loving dudes everywhere aflutter. Courtney B. Vance is a sonar operator, meaning he spends most of the movie just listening to sonar, and yet in his unique casual cool reminded me that, between this and “Cookie’s Fortune,” he should have been a full-fledged movie star. Scott Glenn as the American sub commander is magnetic in how he quietly holds each pressure-packed moment in his utterly impassive face before calmly making a split-second decision. (Fred Dalton Thompson is definitely a dude as commander of the USS Enterprise, but the truth is, in a similar role in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” Hannah Waddingham out-dudes him.) And though what Connery says (in his native brogue, proving once again that movie accents don’t have to matter) as Ramius often carries great weight, what’s more impressive is how the actor carries a lifetime of experience in his air. The script is coy with Ramius’s politics, perhaps not to offend any delicate American sensibilities, and that feels like a checkmark, but Connery makes up for it by maintaining a genuinely moving dignity of purpose.