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Too close to reality
[Photos: Paramount Pictures]
In The Sum of All Fears, Ben Affleck’s Jack Ryan is more an ensemble player, who is at his best when he’s in the corner of the frame. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 30, 2002
The challenge in the latest movie made from a Tom Clancy novel is making what seems all too real - a terrorist attack on the United States -- palatable to the viewer.
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The tolerance of American moviegoers for disaster and Ben Affleck gets tested in The Sum of All Fears, the fourth Tom Clancy novel featuring CIA hero Jack Ryan and the first to seem scarily plausible.
Before the attacks of Sept. 11, the only obstacle Paramount Pictures faced was explaining how Affleck might mature into Harrison Ford, or at least Alec Baldwin, who both played Ryan in previous movies. Now a story line featuring a nuclear attack by terrorists on a U.S. city isn't far enough outside the realm of possibility. The bomb goes off in The Sum of All Fears, turning Clancy's pipe dream into what looked like the evening news not long ago.
Director Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) somehow avoids making this coincidental carnage objectionable. It's obvious long before the explosion that The Sum of All Fears is a smart movie giving the audience credit for its intelligence. The action isn't tasteless in hindsight like the bomb smuggling mishaps of Big Trouble or the soulless vigilantism of Collateral Damage, two releases postponed after Sept. 11. We accept the calamity as a point of drama, sadly wiser from experience but not offended.
Morgan Freeman stars as William Cabot and Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, directed by Phil Alden Robinson.
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Screenwriters Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne changed Clancy's terrorists from Muslim extremists (a powder-keg choice even before Sept. 11) into neo-Nazis who obtain an Israeli nuclear bomb lost in 1973. Their plan is to detonate the bomb at a sporting event resembling the Super Bowl -- the NFL didn't cooperate -- and blame the attack on Russia. That would set off a series of devastating retaliations between the superpowers, enabling the neo-Nazis to take control.
Ryan, then, has a dual agenda: Track down the bomb before it explodes (oops) and prevent an angrily shaken president (James Cromwell) and a Russian leader (Ciaran Hinds) who seems capable of doing such a thing from starting World War III. But this is a new, unimproved Ryan with Affleck in the role, younger and less experienced in field operations than the ones in The Hunt for Red October (Baldwin), Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (both Ford).
Ben Affleck plays a young Jack Ryan, merely a CIA analyst and not yet the agency director he is in Tom Clancy’s novel.
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Affleck's Ryan is merely a CIA analyst, not the agency director Clancy knew he would be after those earlier missions. It's a curious example of adapting a franchise to star power, the most jarring since Roger Moore took over as James Bond. The setting of The Sum of All Fears is 2002, but Ryan should have gone through such a drastic espionage indoctrination 30 years ago, in the author's way of thinking.
Under these circumstances, Affleck has the properly vacant look of someone in over his head. The screenwriters wisely make Ryan more of an ensemble player in this chess game, with Morgan Freeman turning in another sagely agreeable performance as the agent's mentor and Cromwell looking diplomatically brittle. Liev Schreiber does most of the dirty work as a CIA operative (previously played by Willem Dafoe). Robinson keeps the film percolating except for Ryan's budding romance with his future wife (Bridget Moynahan; Anne Archer before).
Clancy's knack for Washington detail and behind-the-curtain personalities is intact, making The Sum of All Fears play as genuine as the fact-based Thirteen Days. There is a lock-tumbler rhythm to details as we learn them: a glimpse of a swastika exposing a mastermind, a mother's inadvertent snitching, an arms smuggler (Colm Fiore) getting a bargain then his just desserts. The movie, in fact, is more satisfying as a thriller when Ryan's out of the picture, or at least in a corner of the frame. The whole of The Sum of All Fears is greater than its prettiest part.
The Sum of All Fears
- Grade: B-plus
- Director: Phil Alden Robinson
- Cast: Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Bates, Philip Baker Hall
- Screenplay: Paul Attanasio, Daniel Pyne, based on the novel by Tom Clancy
- Rating: PG-13; disaster images, violence, profanity
- Running time: 118 min.
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