YMMV / Clear and Present Danger

• Anti-Climax: One of the criticisms of the film was that the final confrontation with Cortez and rescuing the captured soldiers wasn't nearly as exciting as the ambush scene midway through the film.
• Awesome Music: The film's score, composed by James Horner, is very memorable.
• Complete Monster: (film version)
  • Colonel Félix Cortez is the duplicitous intelligence officer for Colombian drug lord Ernesto Escobedo. When Ernesto's actions cause the US to uncover a money laundering operation and send several FBI and CIA agents to Colombia, Félix organizes an ambush of the agents, leading to several deaths while Félix also murders the FBI secretary he seduced to get information. When Félix discovers that American soldiers are secretly sabotaging the cartels, he promises to kill Escobedo and take over the drug trade, reduce the flow of drugs into the US, and allow the Americans to regularly arrest his men in exchange for letting him kill the soldiers. This results in Félix's men slaughtering the soldiers and capturing two of them.
  • Robert "Bob" Ritter, CIA Deputy Director of Operations, is the partner of National Security Advisor Admiral James Cutter who helps him run Operation RECIPROCITY. Ritter recruits John Clark to lead a team of soldiers in sabotaging Colombian drug cartels, resulting in several raids on drug facilities. When one of the attacks results in several innocent women and children being killed, Ritter brushes off Cutter's moral objections and pushes him to continue the operation. Ritter smugly informs hero Jack Ryan that due to Ritter's manipulations, Jack will receive all of the blame for RECIPROCITY if it's exposed while he and Cutter get presidential pardons. Later, Ritter and Cutter agree to sell out the soldiers in Colombia to Félix Cortez, leading to most of them being killed. When a livid Clark demands to know what happened to the soldiers, Ritter and Cutter try to trick him into murdering Ryan.
• Idiot Ball: Moira Wolfe for having told Cortez of Jacobs' departure, information with which Cortez correctly deduced that Jacobs was coming to Colombia and thus provided him a perfect opportunity to turn up the heat on Escobedo. To be fair, she couldn't have known he was an associate of Escobedo, but you would think that someone in the employ of the FBI would be cautious about not confiding such information about the goings-on of America's top law enforcement agency even in casual conversation. The result of this is her own death at Cortez's hands along with that of Jacobs and most of his entourage in Colombia, dramatically worsening the tensions in the region.
• Magnificent Bastard: John Clark is a C.I.A. operative recruited by National Security Advisor James Cutter and CIA Deputy Director of Operations Bob Ritter to carry out Operation RECIPROCITY against the Colombian drug cartels. Forming a small team of highly trained soldiers, Clark leads them in sabotaging the cartels’ operations while keeping their involvement secret, notably killing most of the leadership with a fake car bomb. Clark also helps Dr. Jack Ryan uncover a massive money-laundering scheme the cartels are involved in. Later Cutter and Ritter cut off communications between Clark and his men, resulting in them being captured or killed, and put the blame on Ryan to get Clark to murder him. Clark then kidnaps Ryan and tells Ritter that he's killed Ryan, realizing that he was lying when he doesn't restore communications. Clark then teams up with Ryan and, along with a helicopter pilot Clark recruits and the one soldier that escaped, pulls off a four-man mission to rescue the captured soldiers from a heavily guarded base and kill the man responsible for the death of his men.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Cutter and Ritter arguably crossed this when they authorized an operation in which several innocent children are caught in the crossfire and killed during an airstrike on the gathering cartel leaders. In the film, Ritter expresses virtually no concern for the collateral damage being shown on TV while Cutter is aghast at the scene. If not here, then definitely when they agreed to sacrifice their own soldiers in order to secure a tentative alliance with Cortez.
  • Cortez probably crosses it in the book when he tortures the servants who survived that attack to death to see if any of them are The Mole even while knowing that the leak almost certainly came from elsewhere.
• Narm: Inexplicably, there's a jar of candy on the President's desk that deflates the intensity of his early declaration of war on the cartels.
• One-Scene Wonder: In the film there is an unnamed gray-haired security agent who is present during the ambush on the FBI director's convoy. During the ensuing gun battle he proves himself to be very brave and competent, and heroically sacrifices himself to help Ryan and the others escape. He was only in the film for a few minutes, but he was enough of a badass for people to remember him.
  • In a "blink and you'll miss it" scene, he also serves on Jack Ryan's protection detail in Patriot Games at the hospital keeping him from starting a fight with an IRA spokesman.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Ritter has shades of this. He helps set up and manage the illegal Colombia operation, but makes it clear he doesn't like the president or Cutter and considers the operation to be their pet project and admits to Clark that it's for revenge and reelection. As a career intel official he's likely played this game for several administrations. He went along with selling out the Special Forces team and later Ryan to cover it up, but the idea originated with Cutter.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • During the ambush scene, a string carrying the rocket that strikes the second van in the convoy can be clearly seen if one looks hard enough.
  • The scene where the Smart Bomb blows up the cartel's hideout has not aged well since release, with the CGI bomb itself simply being pasted onto the footage in several shots.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Interestingly, of all Tom Clancy novels, this is the one that got closest to being adapted with Ghost Recon Wildlands. The premise is that the protagonists, American special forces soldiers led by a CIA agent, are sent in to destabilize The Cartel ruling Bolivia after the criminal organization attacks a US embassy. They use a lot of morally-questionable methods to strike back and achieve very little since the cartel is replaced by foreign mercenaries almost immediately. The cartel also didn't actually attack the embassy.
• Tear Jerker: The death of Admiral Greer. And if that weren't enough, the scenes of his funeral service are interspersed with scenes of the ambushed American soldiers in Colombia being mowed down by the cartel and begging for air support that will never come.
  • The ambush on the convoy that sees both Dan Murray and Emil Jacobs killed, along with countless other agents. Jack is the only man we see to emerge relatively unscathed, and is forced to return home with the bodies of so many countrymen in tow as they are given full honors prior to burial.
  • The deaths of the women and children at the cartel leaders' main compound in the airstrike is also certain to leave viewers more than a little disturbed.
  • Clark is attacked by a grieving Chavez when he returns to find his men, with Chavez's raw screams of 'You left us! You left us!' filled with genuine anguish, as is the heartbroken look on Clark's face when he sees Chavez stumble out of the jungle.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While it's debatable which elements of the film this applies to, an obvious example would be the reduced focus of the commando raids and how the Battle of Ninja Hill is changed to a more one-sided cartel victory in a fight by a creekbed.
• The Woobie: Moira in the book, a widow who is used by Cortez and has a very deep It's All My Fault moment that almost drives her to suicide.

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