'Clear and Present Danger' is full of great scenes which never really come together to make a great movie. It's trying to tell too many different stories and so, even with nearly two and half hours screen time, each story feels too short and incomplete. There are at least a half-dozen major plot threads running concurrently; give the director credit for at least TRYING to fit everything that matters in from another of Tom Clancy's super-fat bestsellers. The other problem though is Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford). He is not the action hero of 'Patriot Games.' Here, he is a dupe at first, then a decoy at the end, and in between sort of a standard-issue government official (albeit a rare honest one). John Clark (Willem Defoe) is the closest thing to a 'hero' present. There is a large ensemble cast, everyone has a role to play, and Ryan frankly is reduced to being just another member of that ensemble. In short, the US President orders (without stating so explicitly, to cover his own butt) a covert military operation against drug cartels in Colombia. Clark heads up a small, elite squad that then begins going around blowing up labs and generally disrupting the drug business. In apparent retaliation, the FBI director and his entourage are killed in their motorcade while on a visit to Bogota. A Cuban intelligence expert working for one of the drug lords approaches National Security Adviser Cutter (the president's right-hand man) for a truce, and a deal-in exchange for his cutting drug exports to the US in half, he wants the inserted military team cut off and abandoned, so he can kill them. As mentioned, there are several other side-plots (Admiral Greer has terminal cancer, an FBI secretary is seduced by the Cuban intelligence agent and murdered) so there is a lot of jumping back and forth among the various players and situations. Among the best scenes is the ambush of the FBI director's motorcade in Colombia; very well-staged and realistic, it's a real nail-biter of a sequence. But there are several other good action set-pieces as well. 'Clear and Present Danger' does not seem as long as it is. It's just too bad the director, Philip Noyce, and the trio of screenwriters couldn't make the film a more cohesive package and found better ways to pump up Ford's role. After 'The Hunt for Red October' and 'Patriot Games,' we have certainly come to expect more from the Jack Ryan character than to be a fall-guy for a slippery Prez and his corrupt underlings, even if he belatedly turns the tables on them.