I’m putting up Tom Clancy’s military counterterror technothriller Rainbow Six because weren’t they going to make a movie version? They were trying to get Ryan Reynolds to play John Clark, which I dunno is that great a fit. I mean, obviously Reynolds can play a badass, but I always saw Clark as being more hulking than Reynolds. Also: can they afford him, at this point? Ryan Reynolds probably has at least one more Deadpool movie in him, or at least an X-Force movie. …But I digress. Rainbow Six has a bit of the Clancy Bloat to it, but I never cared too much; it’s a blessed beach book anyway.
Clark has been played by 2 actors so far – Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger and Liev Schrieber in The Sum of All Fears. Neither really did it for me, although Dafoe had the military-acting cred from Platoon.
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I can’t see Ryan Reynolds in it, at all. Nor Dwayne Johnson – his CV is too well known and too lightweight.
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I think Adam Baldwin would be perfect (Animal Mother is a hulking menace, but he can play intelligent authority well like in The Last Ship), but he’s almost exclusively a supporting actor, and that isn’t the kind of box office draw that the studios want anchoring a potential franchise like this.
I wonder whether the big screen version would have stuck with the novel’s eco-terrorist group as the big bad.
I know it isn’t like the other novels he wrote (it’s mostly a vigilante story, with a side plot about an attempt to free PoWs in North Vietnam), but I’d personally like to see ‘Without Remorse’ on the big screen one of these days.