One of the best Tom Clancy books is Without Remorse. In fact, it is the best of the non-Jack-Ryan books hands down with Red Storm Rising coming a close second.
Tom Clancy ended up hating Hollywood for what they did to his books. I think he had only a 3 book deal and refused to give in anymore while he was alive because Tinsel Town simply fouled them up.
And with this one, he would be right once again.
From what I see in this preview, they decided to do a Black Punisher movie but hiding it behind a Tom Clancy character. I would have not minded making John Kelly black if they at least had the decency of following the original story, even with some modernization.
But no. Let’s make a Black Action movie because we need one but we do not have the brains to do it right,
He was fantastically fact driven, and as such he would have likely hated Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series, especially with it’s putrid season 2 Marxism worship.
The only Hollywierd Move I can think of off-hand that was fairly true to the book was “The Godfather.” Maybe because Mario Puzo was the co-screen writer. What they did to “I, Robot” and “Starship Troopers” was criminal. Even “The Hunt for Red October” left out a lot of the motivation for Captain Ramius’s actions.
Hated the hack job on “Starship Troopers”…
Gone with the Wind was quite true to the book. 2001 also, partly because the book was written alongside the movie rather than before. 2010, on the other hand, was the complete opposite of the book.
As for Clancy, the hack job on The Sum of all Fears was particularly nasty PC stuff.
Red Storm Rising would be nice, though it’s so big that would be tricky. Perhaps if the movie focuses mostly on the Iceland part of the story that might work. That has some particularly nice touches in it. I liked the one involving the fish.
Also Executive Orders, that could be seriously scary.
If they just marketed this as an action movie with Michael B. Jordan, I’d be all over it. There was no reason to tie in Clancy and then change the whole story. Hollywood decision makers have no clue.
The only movie I ever saw that was as good as, or better than, the book was “Jaws,” and that’s because the movie did away with an extraneous love story and went with a straight-up, man vs. fish, duel.
(All right, maybe “The Godfather, too. But that’s it.)
When I hear about Hollyweird butchering an adaptation, I always think of Clive Cussler and how they screwed up Sahara.
There are a rare few adaptations that work, but not often. Hence why I am glad we have not seen an attempt to adapt David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels.
Honor Harrington… my hero! Er, Heroine…
The original adaptations of “Day of the Jackal” and “The Andromeda Strain” are also very very well done, and follow the books almost perfectly.
Sadly, their more modern adaptions really, really, really suck.
It would seem that despite our modern FX tech, the ability of Hollywood to adapt books into movies is steadily decreasing, because of a need to fill things with PC BS.
Even the Day of the Jackal with Bruce Willis ain’t half bad. But the original does kick ass.
I wondered why there were no more Clancy books turned into movies. Red October, they did pretty well. But the others, not so much. Some would be awesome, like ‘the Bear and the Dragon’. But the Chinese would never allow Hollywood to make it.
I’ll go raciss here and say you can’t replace Kelly with a black man, due to the culture of the time they start the story, as well as the story itself. You can make an equivalent, like they apparently did, but you’ll lose the story for other parts of the franchise.
They did that with ‘clear and present danger’. They killed off people that are integral in future books. FWIW Willem Defoe was a great John Kelly in that movie.