Held every seven years in some unsuspecting town, The Tournament is a numbers game. For 24 hours, 30 of the world’s best assassins compete for a $10 million prize in a competition with only one rule: Kill or die. What more setup does an action-craving viewer need?

With tracking devices implanted in their tummies, contestants worthy of note include a parkouring Frenchman (Sebastien Foucan, who performed similar duties against 007 in 2006’s Casino Royale), a crazy-ass Texan (a miscast Ian Somerhalder, TV’s Lost), a Russian special forces member (Undisputed series badass Scott Adkins), a Triad vet (Kelly Hu, X-Men 2’s Lady Deathstrike) and the returning champion (Ving Rhames, Pulp Fiction). The latter is only in it to avenge the recent death of his wife by the trigger-happy hands of a fellow contestant — he just doesn’t know which one. Blah, details.

This particular do-or-die tourney takes place in Middlesbrough, a British town boasting more public surveillance cameras than anywhere on the globe — fortuitous for the assembled high-rollers hoping to make a mint off the blood of 29 hired guns. They are as unapologetic about their gambling as director Scott Mann (2015’s Heist) is about depicting irredeemably graphic acts of violence; let’s just say more than one human head explodes.

Accidentally caught in the crossfire of the shoot-’em-up (by events so unbelievable, explanation is futile) is a hooch-sloshing priest (Robert Carlyle, Trainspotting) and, one assumes, the audience surrogate. Yet you need not be inebriated to feel The Tournament’s juice kick in; Mann and company take care of providing the rush on their own. Virtually unseen, the film deserves better — not pantheon placement, but some sort of regard among fans of swiftly and slickly executed set pieces of undiluted action. Mann does that so well and so often, it seems as if the flick weren’t scripted so much as improvised, taking suggestions from audience members into what situations he should throw his players and their weapons: “In a slaughterhouse!” “At a strip club!” “On a moving bus! You know, the double-decker kind!” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Having already taken over the iconic role of Capt. Kirk in the rebooted Star Trek, Chris Pine guns for another A-list franchise in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. It’s a prequel that serves as an origin story for the badass CIA analyst embodied originally by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, most famously by Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and forgettably by Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears. Fear not this belated fifth chapter.

Following the events of 9/11 — and thus messing with the series’ timeline, but get over it — Ryan trades studying economics for a stint in the Marines. Serving in Afghanistan, he endures a spinal injury in the process — an RPG-downed helicopter, to be precise — and while undergoing physical therapy is recruited by Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner, talking out one side of his mouth as if simultaneously storing nuts in his cheeks and packing sunflower seeds and Skoal in his bottom lip) to be a spy under the CIA’s employ. Ten years later, working undercover on Wall Street, Ryan notices something fishy in a Russian corporation’s books and is sent to Moscow to clean it up.

Using U.S./Russia pipeline talks as a MacGuffin, director Kenneth Branagh (Thor) casts himself as Viktor Cherevin, the cirrhotic head of the Russkie firm plotting America’s economic collapse … and only Jack Ryan can stop him! Well, with generous assistance from Ryan’s fiancée therapist (Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game) and Harper, in an elongated heist sequence that recalls the set pieces of Paramount’s tone-similar Mission: Impossible films. (Pine even adopts Tom Cruise’s famous palms-flat/fingers-out running stance.) Knightley’s convenient appearance in Moscow just in time for the operation is a contrivance, yes, but one that works.

Although the Cold War long has thawed, Shadow Recruit presses the “reheat” button to recall the ’80s-Reagan flavor of the previous installments, all based on Tom Clancy novels. Working from a script co-written by first-timer Adam Cozad and old pro David Koepp (Jurassic Park), Branagh all but dispenses with the Clancy touchstones of geopolitical rigamarole and overtly right-wing rah-rah hoohah that oftentimes crippled the pace of the predecessors, and focuses on action. In doing so — and in bathing the screen in gorgeous saturated colors during moments of inaction — he delivers a surprisingly engaging spy tale, fleet of foot. You can feel it dividing itself into traditional thirds, each clicking neatly into place. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.