Christopher McQuarrie is a damn good screenwriter. THE USUAL SUSPECTS, VALKYRIE, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL were all great screenplays. As a director he has only shown us THE WAY OF THE GUN, which was awesome, and the upcoming JACK REACHER has very good buzz surrounding it. It looks like that buzz may have helped him land his next directing gig.
According to Deadline, McQuarrie is going to write an adaptation of Tom Clancy’s WITHOUT REMORSE and may direct it as well.
WITHOUT REMORSE features the character of John Clark, Clancy’s second most popular character after Jack Ryan. In fact, this novel fits directly in with that series as it features Emmet Ryan, father of Jack Ryan.
Plot: Avid readers of Clancy’s bestselling techno-thrillers ( The Hunt for Red October et al.) know agent John Kelly, code-named Mr. Clark, as Jack Ryan’s “dark side.” Here, in 1970, Vietnam vet Kelly gets involved in a secret operation to rescue 20 American pilots from a North Vietnamese prison camp. Betrayed by someone in Washington, the mission ends in apparent failure. Clancy balances the military movements with a dark narrative of Kelly’s tragic personal life. While mourning the death of his pregnant wife in a traffic accident, Kelly picks up a young hitchhiker named Pam, a prostitute and drug “mule” fleeing her cruel masters. The pair fall in love and set out to bring down the drug lords, but an error on Kelly’s part leads to Pam’s horrible demise at the hands of the vengeful criminals. After his own recovery from a shotgun blast, Kelly begins methodically to murder his way through the drug ring.
John Clark has appeared on screen before, played by Willem Dafoe in CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER and again by Liev Schrieber in THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. McQuarrie would be reworking a script by Shawn Ryan (THE SHIELD).
This would be interesting more if the final goal would be to cross the upcoming Kenneth Branagh foray into the Jack Ryan universe with the John Clark stories. Seeing as both are being handled by the same studio, it is definitely a possibility.