New York Times
"...Sleek....Ford's restrained performance is just right..." 06/05/1992 p.C17USA Today
"...Lively..." 06/05/1992 p.4D Entertainment Weekly
"...[Ford is] the rare action star who's witty enough to thrive on good dialogue..." 06/15/1992 p.36-7 Los Angeles Times
"...The film's frequent action sequences are crisply done, the technology that Clancy is known for is skillfully visualized..." 06/05/1992 p.F1 Chicago Sun-Times
"...The high-tech stuff is absorbing. Harrison Ford once again demonstrates what a solid, convincing actor he is..." 06/12/1992 p.41 Chicago Sun-Times 7 of 10
You don't expect a Tom Clancy movie to end with people tracking each other around a darkened house, followed by a gun battle involving two speedboats, one of them on fire, on a dark and stormy night. I haven't read Clancy's Patriot Games, and for all I know this movie is faithful to his book, but on the basis of The Hunt for Red October, which I have read, I expected this one to be a little more cerebral and without the Indiana Jones ending...Clancy is known for his expertise on high-tech, state-of-the-art weapons and surveillance systems, and for me the most interesting scenes in the movie involve survey satellites that are used to spy on the activities at terrorist training camps in the Sahara..."Patriot Games" includes the usual decisions that are made only by the characters in thrillers. For example, aware that vicious hit men have targeted his family, Ryan takes his wife and daughter to their isolated summer home, on a windy and rain-swept coast. I forgive movies for decisions like this, because I know that if Ryan did the obvious thing and set up bunks for his family inside a vault at CIA headquarters in Langley, the movie would be over. But such decisions don't make the character seem much brighter..."Patriot Games" at least has the virtue, in this season of soft porn masquerading as hard thrillers, of being about subjects more interesting than the character's sex lives. The high-tech stuff is absorbing. Harrison Ford once again demonstrates what a solid, convincing actor he is, and there's good supporting work from Archer, Thora Birch as the Ryans' precocious daughter, and the irreplaceable James Fox as a British cabinet minister. But at the end, when a character is leaping into a burning speedboat in choppy seas, I wondered if this was exactly what Tom Clancy had in mind. - Roger Ebert
The Washington Post 6 of 10
Given the creative recession in the movies, you could do worse than sit through "Patriot Games." If this would-be blockbuster slavishly follows summer movie guidelines, it does so well -- or adequately. Neither poisonous nor great, it never loses sight of its mall-movie mandate, to defend American hearth and home against invincible boy-toy bogymen...In this very loose adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel (which the author publicly lambasted), inactive CIA analyst Harrison Ford, wife Anne Archer and daughter Thora Birch find themselves the nuclear-family target of a vengeful Irish terrorist. On vacation with his family in London, Ford heroically intervenes in an assassination attempt on royal family member James Fox...In the melee, Ford kills the baby brother of mega-assassin Sean Bean. That's bad. That's very bad...Paramount Pictures (hoping to make more Clancy movies) asks you to enjoy -- and overlook -- the hyping of everything. For one thing, Bean's terrorist outfit (a breakaway faction of the IRA) has an operating budget the Pentagon would die for. They have top-of-the-line speedboats, infrared storm-the-fortress equipment, nasty car bombs and the usual glut of machine guns. They have easy access to London cabs and Libyan ships. Of course they're thick as thieves with Moammar Gadhafi...Director Phillip Noyce, who made the gripping thriller "Dead Calm," has earned his directorial hack license here. With the knowing assistance of scriptwriters Donald Stewart (who did Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October") and W. Peter Illif (creator of the ridiculously formulaic "Point Break"), "Games" accomplishes its high-stakes mission. But even in the mindless throes of summer, it still feels like a dull triumph. - Desson Howe
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