WITHOUT REMORSE - AMAZON PRIME

There’s an odd moment in “Tom Clancy’s WITHOUT REMORSE”, an Amazon Prime Original, where a group of Special Forces soldiers in a sticky situation decide - as they may not make it out alive - to reveal their actual names to each other. Their code names are Hatchet, Thunder, Dallas, etc. As the group confesses their (dull) real names, one of them says his real name is “Seymour” and then immediately gets defensive about it.

In Clancy’s world, where heroes are called John or Jack, and have uncomplicated whitebread surnames, which are usually interchangeable with their first names (ie Ryan, Clark, Kelly), what was Seymour expecting or fearing from his fellow soldiers? That they would ridicule him for having a fancy name with more than one syllable, ie a signifier of pretension or that he might be “middle-class”, and therefore not a real soldier in Clancy’s world? Or, better yet, maybe he was fed up with his fellow hard-men troopers bursting into “Suddenly, Seymour” whenever he stated his real name (I was hoping this to be the case). We never find out; the scene doesn’t really end, it just cuts away.

WITHOUT REMORSE plays like it was written by a fourteen year old raised on Call Of Duty. Except it was written by Taylor Sheridan, who only a while back wrote the surprising SICARIO and the beautiful, character-led, HELL OR HIGH WATER.

Its action scenes are directed stylishly by Stefano Solllima, a key director of the GOMORRAH tv series, but it is an empty film, deploying an obvious revenge trope, and a waste of the considerable talents of Michael B Jordan, Jamie Bell, Jodie Turner-Smith and Guy Pearce.

“Suddenly, Seymour
Is standing beside me,
He don't give me orders,
He don't condescend.
Suddenly, Seymour
Is here to provide me.
Sweet understanding,
Seymour's my friend.”

If only.