Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

This reboot for novelist Tom Clancy's CIA agent finds Chris Pine stepping into the shoes previously worn by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck, and presents Ryan as a fresh-faced rookie up against post-9/11 global terror threats. After he is dispatched to Moscow by his boss (Kevin Costner), Ryan investigates a plot to crash financial markets, which snowball into a series of hair-raising skirmishes that put millions of lives at risk. Director Kenneth Branagh (who also co-stars as a scenery-chewing Russian oligarch) pitches his film directly at audiences wooed by the high-octane exploits of Bond or Bourne, giving a wide berth to the more geopolitical and cerebral elements of Clancy's stories. The thrills and spills may be strictly by the book, but Pine is good value as the government penpusher who finds himself, initially, out of his depth as he is thrust into the front lines of espionage.