I watched Without Remorse the day it came out.
I am disappointed.
This version is not bad. It's just... Not Clancy.
Clancy stuff have intrigue, spy games, negotiations, tense without explosions, but not giant selfish conspiracies (unless you count the villains in Rainbow Six, and even then, he believes he's doing it to save humanity)
This... does not.
(From here on it's all spoiler, folks.)
(You)
(Have)
(Been)
(Warned)
Without having read Without Remorse, you would probably see the Amazon movie as an "okay" revenge tale, where he found the real culprit at a somewhat unexpected place, but still got his vengeance.
But the book was NOTHING like it.
Basically, the screenwriter took the name, and little else (that I really noticed).
Book TL;DR -- John Kelly lost his pregnant wife to a car accident. In desperate loneliness, he picked up hitchhiker Pam, who's running away from a drug lord and pimp who's using his girls to run drugs by forcing them to be addicts first. John fell for Pam, but in a bout of stupid, he was almost killed and Pam was kidnaped, tortured, and killed by the drug lord, then the body left in the park. John recovered, and swore vengeance on the drug lord by disguising himself as a wino, and carefully observed drug distribution network and pimp network, and started killing dealers one level at a time to find his way to the drug lord, and the police were wondering who's offing dealers and pimps in the city. But it was then CIA needed Kelly on a VERY special mission... They have proof that an MIA B-52 pilot was still alive, and they want him to do a recon because he had previously escaped from the area. So Kelly reluctantly went to Vietnam. He wasn't able to rescue the guy, but he was able to nab the Russian interrogator (pure accident). Kelly's CIA boss (Greer) extracted a promise from the Russians: the guy will be returned uninterrogated if the Russians would transfer the POW to be with all the other prisoners in the "Hanoi Hilton". Russians agreed. Greer wanted to recruit Kelly, then Kelly told Greer he was offing dealers and he needs to finish his job. Greer gave him a little time, as the CIA is not involved. So Kelly found the bad guys, killed everybody including the corrupt cop, then pulled a disappearing act, faking his death, to become Mister Clark.
Movie TL;DR -- John Kelly, Navy SEAL, is on a mission in Syrian raiding what they were told, was a comms depot. It turns out to be an arms depot manned by Russians. They barely got away, losing one of his own. Kelly is spending some time with his wife Pam, 9 months pregnant. An assassination squad gunned down Kelly's team in the US, almost killed Kelly, and killed his wife and unborn daughter. Kelly thirsted for vengeance and ambushed the Russian liaison in public view, but he got a name: Rykov. Kelly was temporarily imprisoned but was extracted, apparently by SecDef Clay's orders, to form a special team to go after Rykov in Murmansk, Russia. On their way, the plane was shot down by Russian fighters, but they managed to escape, infiltrate Murmansk, only to find out this is a setup to leave American soldiers dead on Russian soil... Surrounded by hostile snipers and Russian police and military, Kelly decided to pull his Alamo so his team can get away. At first, he's going T2, causing plenty of explosions but no casualties, but as soon as he got flanked after his team had gotten away, he went into deathmatch mode and gunned down every guy he saw, then pulled a Leon the Professional disappearing act. He snuck back into the US, kidnapped Clay, forced a confession out of him, then drowned him. Ritter, with the taped confession from Clay, was able to secretly negotiate with Russia to deescalate and get promoted to head of CIA, and Kelly became Mister Clark.
As you can see, apart from the names, there's almost NO commonality among the two plots, except maybe the wino bit, and "I must avenge her" thing.
Honestly, I have no problem if they need to modernize the stuff, but this has VERY little to do with "Without Remorse". It's more "inspired by" instead of "based on".
This is practically fan fiction where you rewrote your heroes into your own situations.
It's "competent", but little else. It pays VERY LITTLE homage to the original material, and that... is its biggest sin.
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