“You’ve broken the law of good cinema”: The Harrison Ford movie that pissed off Quentin Tarantino
Harrison Ford is unquestionably one of modern Hollywood’s marquee movie stars and has been for almost 50 years, but that doesn’t mean Quentin Tarantino gives him a pass for committing a cardinal sin of cinema that the filmmaker simply cannot abide by.
Ever since Star Wars launched him to superstardom back in 1977, Ford has found his greatest successes playing clean-cut everymen and stoic heroes. Sure, he’s always brought plenty of charm and charisma to the table in his blockbuster outings, but the characters who anchor his biggest and best films don’t tend to possess many shades of grey.
That was clearly an issue for Tarantino, who let rip at one of Ford’s many box office winners for taking the easy way out, breaking his self-professed “rule of good cinema” in the process. In most action flicks, the good guy defeats the bad guy, which is how things are supposed to go. However, having the hero straight-up murder the villain is a line that plenty of movies have been too afraid to cross, which is where the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs director’s issues lay.
For the majority of audience members, Patriot Games is a solid meat-and-potatoes action thriller in which Ford replaces Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan. It has Sean Bean as the principal antagonist, so based on his onscreen history, the chances of the actor Sean Miller making it to the end credits in one piece were already slim.
Ford’s Ryan kills Miller’s brother in an early exchange, but when the two end up locked in a battle to the death during the climactic third act action beat, director Philip Noyce – by Tarantino’s estimation, at least – chickened out and relied on a narrative tactic that made his blood boil.
“They get into this stupid fight on a boat, and they do the thing that my friends and I despised the most: Harrison Ford hits the guy, and he falls on an anchor, and it kills him,” Tarantino raged to Dennis Hopper. “And it’s like you can hear a committee thinking about this and saying, ‘Well, he killed him with his own hands, but he didn’t really mean to kill him, so he can go back to his family, and his daughter, and his wife and still be an OK guy. He caused the death, but it was kind of accidental.”
That’s generally how these movies tend to work so that the protagonist doesn’t end up painted as a cold-blooded killer, but Tarantino was indignant. “As far as I’m concerned, the minute you kill your bad guy by having him fall on something, you should go to movie jail,” he explained. “You’ve broken the law of good cinema.”
Tarantino fully supported Patriot Games until the end, when it completely lost him. Before that point, he was invested in Ford and Bean’s adversarial relationship, which had “a legitimate reason” to exist. When their battle to the death resulted in the latter inadvertently having his clogs popped by the former, the filmmaker’s enjoyment of the sequel to The Hunt for Red October was instantly ruined.
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