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THE SUM OF ALL FEARS Send This Review to a Friend
We can now all rest assured that if nuclear annihilation is ever imminent we have a secret weapon. It's Ben Affleck. It may be bye-bye Baltimore by virtue of a terrorist atomic bomb, but in the aftermath of destruction, Affleck as Jack Ryan shows that a dedicated C.I.A. man can practically single handedly stop the President of the United States and the President of Russia from going nuclear against one another on the mistaken assumption that each has launched an aggression, exactly what Neo-Nazi terrorists want to happen.
Have you got all that? If you believe the maneuvers and outcome of "The Sum of All Fears" you can sleep well, unless you happen to live in Baltimore, where a crated bomb is shipped into port. This is one of those foolish films that still works up a certain amount of tension just because it is dealing with the fate of the world. But the heroics become so absurd in the script (by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne from Tom Clancy's novel) as Ryan, the tried and true Clancy hero at the stage of being a scholar new to the C.I.A, rushes around to umteen locations with his cell phone in hand, visits a hospital crowded with wounded, including his dying boss (Morgan Freeman), battles in a life-and-death fight with a villainous strongman--why go on? Oh yes, there's also a romantic ending as Ryan and his girlfriend nurse, Cathy Muller (Bridget Moynahan ), who has managed to survive as a contemporary Florence Nightingale, picnic near the White House while treaties are being signed.
The one positive note in this busy but credibility-straining film directed by Phil Alden Robinson is that it puts on the agenda the threat we're all facing. In this instance a bomb made with our plutonium but lost by Israel in a wartime crash in the 1970s is found and sold to terrorists. Neo-Nazis? Seems like the wrong enemy to worry about these days, but who knows? Did anyone think domestic terrorism would produce the Oklahoma City disaster. Anyhow, the potential obliteration of an American metropolis is on many minds these days as worry mounts about terrorists in a new twist to the nuclear dangers faced ever since the Cold War.
At various points I thought of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire "Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Kubrick probably was closer to the truth with his comedy, in which the insanity of arming to the teeth with nuclear weapons triggers doomsday. But Kubrick didn't have Ben Affleck.
The special effects people work their wiles and the cast members give their somber best, including James Cromwell as the U.S. President, Ron Rifkin as Secretary of State, Philip Baker Hall as Secretary of Defense and Ciaran Hinds as President Nemerov. There'll probably be a spate of films now dealing with terrorist attacks, but they'll need to be more convincing than "The Sum of All Fears." A Paramount Pictures release.
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