The Menace Is Missing

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: PATRIOT GAMES

DIRECTOR: PHILLIP NOYCE

WRITERS: DONALD STEWART, W. PETER ILIFF AND STEVEN ZAILLIAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: A star turn and smart action sequences enliven an otherwise abstract film.

Harrison Ford is like one of those sports cars that advertise acceleration ! from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in three or four seconds. He can go from slightly broody inaction to ferocious reaction in approximately the same time span. And he handles the tight turns and corkscrew twists of a suspense story without losing his balance or leaving skid marks on the film. But maybe the best and most interesting thing about him is that he doesn't look particularly sleek, quick or powerful; until something or somebody causes him to gun his engine, he projects the seemly aura of the family sedan.

He's the best, although perhaps not the only, reason to see Patriot Games, which is a sort of sequel to the successful adaptation of another Tom Clancy thriller, The Hunt for Red October. Ford replaced Alec Baldwin, who played sometime cia intelligence analyst Jack Ryan in the earlier movie, when Baldwin turned uppity. Some other characters are also carried over from the previous venture.

In Red October, based on a book written in late cold war days, Ryan was obliged to prevent nothing less than the accidental outbreak of nuclear holocaust. In Patriot Games his problem is less portentous, more personal: he faces a small rogue faction of the Irish Republican Army -- a bad lot, to be sure, but not exactly a threat to Civilization As We Know It.

They only menace civilization as Ryan knows it, in particular his wife (Anne Archer) and his daughter (Thora Birch). Peaceably strolling along a London street, Ryan happens on a terrorist attack on a cousin of the royal family's. In the course of foiling it, he kills one of the attackers, thereby bringing on himself and his family the relentless, psychopathic enmity of the attacker's brother Sean Miller (Sean Bean, a good, constantly smoldering source of side-stream paranoia).

Miller, with a lot of help from his friends, is a far-darting hit man. One minute he's in Maryland staging a near-miss assault on Ryan's family, the next he's in a Libyan terrorist-training camp. Back and forth across the Atlantic he wings, building up his frequent-flyer miles but somehow not building quite the anxiety you'd think his presence in the world ought to generate.

The movie's global reach is a large part of the problem. Things would be a lot more exciting if the implacable crazy were constantly hanging around the neighborhood, turning every shadow, shrub and fast-food joint into a potential menace (see Robert De Niro in Cape Fear). And the film's fascination with the CIA's high-tech capabilities for worldwide surveillance of miscellaneous creeps is not as stirring as its makers seem to think. It leads to lots of shots of people intently staring into computer screens or exchanging testy dialogue in small rooms.

Overall, there is something abstract and distant about Patriot Games. But there are at least four exciting preliminary confrontations between the good folks and the bad ones, and a stormy-night conclusion in which all of the above are somewhat laboriously maneuvered into a large, dark house, a device that may be conventional but is nonetheless well managed. Along with the expert binding of Ford's performance, these are the juicy raisins -- Shall we say the raisons d'etre? -- in an otherwise blandish pudding.