Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a 2021 action thriller directed by Stefano Sollima, written by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, and released by Amazon Studios. It runs 109 minutes and stars Michael B. Jordan as John Kelly, alongside Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, Guy Pearce, Lauren London and Colman Domingo. It holds a 45 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.8 on IMDb.

I should declare my position before anything else, because it colours all of this. I go into every single film with Michael B. Jordan in it carrying enormous hope, because I want the man to succeed. I am such a fan of him as a person that I wish nothing but great things for him and his career.

Which is precisely why a film like this one stings more than it otherwise would. This could have been an awesome action movie in which he gets to do genuinely great things. The raw materials were all sitting right there.

Instead, the cast were all eh. He was eh. The entire thing was eh. And having sat with it, I genuinely cannot produce a single real win to hand it.

Now, the darkness, because I need vindication on this one. I watched this across three different devices, because I was convinced the problem had to be my screen. I could not see what was happening during the action sequences. Not properly. Shapes were moving and guns were firing and I had very little idea who was where.

It was not my screen. A review published at the time described the film as brutal and muddy, with the actors weighed down in military gear, thumping around and thumping each other while shooting at unseen enemies in dusty, dimly lit rooms. The same reviewer concluded that aside from a few decent shots and stunts, the film is an eyesore that looks more like Call of Duty than anything genuinely cinematic. So no number of devices was ever going to rescue that.

I also wanted to know how much of Clancy’s actual novel survived into this, and the answer is close to none of it. The book was published in 1993 and is a Vietnam-era story in which John Kelly’s girlfriend is murdered by drug dealers, prompting an extraordinarily brutal one-man campaign through Baltimore. That is the spine of the novel.

The film discards essentially all of that and replaces it with a contemporary geopolitical conspiracy involving Russia. One reviewer noted that besides the names, the book and the film appear to have almost nothing in common. A reader put it more bluntly, saying the only thing this shares with the novel is the title. Kelly in the book is also white and of Irish descent, which is a change I have no objection to whatsoever, but it is an indication of how little the production felt bound to the source.