La critique de Roger Ebert (part1)
March 2, 1990  

The movies have one sure way of involving us that never fails.

They give us a character who is right when everybody else is wrong and then invite us to share his frustration as he tries to talk some sense into the blockheads. In "The Hunt for Red October," that character is Jack Ryan, the intelligence man who believes he knows the real reason why a renegade Soviet skipper is trying to run away with a submarine.

The skipper's name is Ramius, and he is the most respected man in the Soviet underwater navy. He has trained most of the other captains in the fleet, and now he has been given the controls of an advanced new submarine named Red October - a sub that uses a revolutionary new drive that is faster than any other ship beneath the waves and almost completely silent. American intelligence tracks the Red October as it leaves its Soviet shipyard, but then the sub seems to disappear. Soon after, the entire Soviet navy mobilizes itself into a vast cat-and-mouse game in the North Atlantic.

The Soviets would like their American counterparts to believe that Ramius is a madman who wants to hide his sub off the American coast and aim its nuclear missiles at New York or Washington. They ask the U.S. Navy to help them track and destroy the Red October. But Ryan (Alec Baldwin) believes that would be a tragic mistake. He tells his superior, an admiral played by James Earl Jones, that Ramius is actually trying to defect and to bring his submarine along with him.

That is the setup for John McTiernan's film, as it was for Tom Clancy's best-selling novel, and in both cases it is also the starting point for a labyrinthine plot in which, half of the time, we have to guess at the hidden reasons for Ramius' actions. It is a tribute to the movie, which has much less time than Clancy did at book length, that it allows the plot its full complexity and yet is never less than clear to the audience.

Many military thrillers, especially those set in the Cold War period, rely on stereotyping and large, crude motivations to move their stories along. "The Hunt for Red October" has more fun by suggesting how easily men can go wrong, how false assumptions can seem seductive and how enormous consequences can sometimes hang by slender threads.Ryan's knowledge of Ramius' personality, for example, upon which so much depends, is based almost entirely on one occasion when they dined at the same table. Everything else is simply a series of skilled hunches.

McTiernan, whose previous films were "Predator" and "Die Hard," showed a sense of style and timing in those movies, but what he adds in "The Hunt for Red October" is something of the same detached intelligence that Clancy brought to the novel. Somehow we feel this is more than a thriller, it's an exercise in military and diplomatic strategy in which the players are all smart enough that we can't take their actions for granted.