The Sum of All Fears

Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair.

All told, it's a reasonably effective movie, but it might have been a lot more effective had it the guts to portray a Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden-like character as its villain instead of this rather unbelievable, but more politically correct, gaggle of cardboard neo-Nazis.

The tension is so plausibly high that you're eager to see how it winds up. Eager enough, in fact, to forgive Jack Ryan for reversing the aging process and winding up as Ben Affleck.

Yet there's no getting around one awkward fact. The picture, which turns on a cataclysmic act of terrorism within U.S. borders, was made for a different audience from the one that's about to see it.

Film's real sticky wicket is that the bad guys not only threaten to nuke a major American city but do it — a conceit that might have been more amusing before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center using hijacked commercial jets. Witnesses said the WTC attack looked like a movie; they didn't say it was a movie they wanted to see.

Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors.

How the hell did Ben Affleck, 29, wind up replacing Harrison Ford, 59, as our hero? Who's next as Ryan -- Ozzy Osbourne's guppy son, Jack? Chronology hasn't been this royally fucked with since Memento.

The Sum of All Fears is a pretty good, but not great, Jack Ryan flick. Ben Affleck plays a solid Ryan, and Morgan Freeman is amazing as always. It's worth a watch.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The film begins with the death of a moderate Russian president and his replacement by a radical named Nemerov. To know who they are dealing with, the American Government recruits an academic who has just written an article about it. However, there seems to be a drop in the loyalty of Russian officials and there are personnel willing to provoke a nuclear war between both countries. The film is a regular thriller based on yet another imminent threat of war between the major world powers. The first part of the film prepares the events, while the rest is the unfolding and worsening of the military crisis, already in a climate of war. For me, the plot worked reasonably, taking some questions of logic and plausibility that seem to me very relevant (such as the fact that the military did not go in search of the nuclear bomb that the plane was carrying when it crashed, or the quiet walks that certain characters give the scenario where, hours before, a devastating nuclear bomb exploded). The cast is satisfactory to the level of this film: Morgan Freeman is competent, to see Richard Marner again was a pleasant surprise and James Cromwell did his part well. Ben Affleck, in turn, sounds a lot to himself and to dozens of other characters. There are few differences between this character and the one he offered us in "Armageddon". From the technical point of view, I emphasize the excellent cinematography and the good use of colors, but also the effects of contrast and dark light. There may have been, in part of the film, a change of lens for more diffused luminance when necessary. The special effects and sound effects are also very good, except for the scene where the bomb explodes, because it never seemed realistic enough to be believable. Overall, it's a medium movie, which is not terribly good or truly inedible. Nice to see, it's not the kind of movie that makes us think.

A mediocre movie. The acting is optimal. The dialogue is optimal. The plot is just good enough. The tension is about seeing other people figuring things out that the movie shows you from the start... You know more than the characters, and that's not super compelling. Mediocre.

A cheesy action movie that falls pretty flat and isn't helped by the horribly miscast Affleck as Jack Ryan.