The Sum of All Fears (2002)

I didn't notice who was responsible for casting, but they made a huge mistake in casting Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan. I heard about him inheriting the role from Harrison Ford for some reason, but my first choice would have been to go back to Alec Baldwin, who did an excellent job in the Hunt for Red October. Morgan Freeman, usually brilliant, also seems to be thrown into this movie incorrectly. The story was convincing, but again star power doesn't necessarily translate into great story telling. Let Ben continue to do the romantic comedies and action movies, but leave the strong serial characters to someone who can truly embody the role.

Fmovies: This is a ridiculous movie. First the casting of Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan just doesn't make sense, chronologically (he's already been played by the much older Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin) or physically – Affleck just isn't commanding enough for the role. Secondly the movie is simply capitalizing on North America's new found fear of terrorism on home turf, and thirdly the screenwriter Paul Attanasio took huge liberties with the Tom Clancy novel, including, in a stroke of misguided political correctness, changing the bad guys from Middle Eastern to Nazis. Of course everyone hates Nazis, so the filmmakers are not going to offend anyone (Hollywood finds it so hard to get good hateful villains now that Russia is no longer communist) but are we to believe that there is a worldwide conspiracy by super-rich and powerful Nazis to pit two world powers against one another? And how, after the blast (yes, there is a huge atomic explosion), does Ben Affleck piece together this entire conspiracy using only a cell phone and a palm pilot? I'm willing to suspend disbelief in most movies, but this movie has holes big enough to fly a jet through.

Sum of All Fears is an enjoyable thriller and the type of movie the Hollywood studios have always been good at making. It's slick, expensive-looking, well-acted and two hours of far-fetched fun. Ben Affleck plays CIA Agent and superman Jack Ryan PhD. Ryan is a former marine, linguist and all-round polymath who saves the world from impending disaster. Affleck is youthful and convincing as Ryan and makes him seem fallible and likable. Ryan becomes a confidant of the wise and sensible CIA Director Bill Cabot (Morgan Freeman) and acquires a beautiful and successful girlfriend (Bridget Moynahan) who believes he's a historian.

The plot is complicated and involves a new Russian leader (Ciaran Hands) who spouts anti-U.S. rhetoric. A Russian chemical attack on Chechnya increases the tension between the two countries. An Israeli atomic bomb is found in the Egyption desert,a relic of the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict. Neo-Nazi terrorists (led by Alan Bates) want to provoke a nuclear conflict between America and Russia. They acquire the bomb from a South African arms dealer and explode it in Baltimore. The U.S. blames the Russians and the two countries are about to commence all-out nuclear war until Ryan works out what is happening and it all ends happily. The message is that the new Russian leaders are reasonable men signifying that the world has moved on from the Commie bashing flicks of the 1980s.

The idea of a terrorist nuclear attack is topical, but unfortunately the Neo-Nazi villains seem very 1970s. The film has good character actors in supporting roles (e.g., Liev Schrieber, James Cromwell). I much prefer Afflek's Ryan to that of the 52 year-old Harrison Ford who by 1994's Clear and Present Danger seemed too old and surly for the role.

The Sum of All Fears fmovies. Well, if we start with the good. The story itself is not really too bad and if you forget the title, the mention of Tom Clancy and Jack Ryan, then the movie is decent enough. It is a reasonably well implemented thriller. Not great but worth seeing.

However, the book is about Arab terrorists performing terrorist acts by means of thermonuclear devices causing the two superpowers to come to the brink of a nuclear war. The movie has replaced this foe with some nonsense story about emerging neo-Nazis wanting to take over the world. This is just utter rubbish. It is obviously a political decision by some asshole not wanting to upset the Arab community so he picks a "safe" bad guy instead. The speech where the head Nazi compares themselves with a virus was just unintelligent writing and painful to watch.

Nazis are obvious bad guys and can be put to good use in movies, just as communists and Muslim terrorists and a whole bunch of other groups, but not when the original material uses another, much more logical, foe. The original foes in the book would have some force behind them in the radical Muslim community that made their plans for world takeover after the superpowers had annihilated each other at least somewhat plausible. If you ignore minor details like that there would really not be much to take over after a barrage of nuclear missiles from USA and Russian of course. But a few twisted old Nazis that sits in hiding in dark rooms cooking together this hair-brained scheme? No way! I am sad to say that whoever asshole that decided to rewrite the main adversary of this movie ruined it totally for me. I am really happy that I never watched it when it came out in the theaters but instead watched it, in a sense "for free", on my Netflix subscription.

I read the book "The Sum of All Fears" with fascination--Palestenians discover an Isreali nuclear device lost when the aircraft is shot down in the six day war, sell it to Al Queda, and the arab terrorists proceed to blow up Denver with said nuke.

I was very much looking forward to this movie, only to find that for fear of offending Al Queda, the director and screenwriters had substituted some ridiculous plot about German Nazi's and turned the whole thing into a melodramatic hash.

This could have been a GREAT, prophetic, movie. instead it became a silly waste of money and talent. I know Tom Clancy hated the movie, so did I.

As usual, I am very glad I saw the movie BEFORE I read the reviews on this site. Why do soooo many reviewers here have to compare the movie to the book? A book allows 300-400 pages (or more) to develop plots and characters. We are reviewing movies on IMDb, not books. I guess reviewers here want to appear erudite by scraping up details from the book that get omitted or distorted on the screen. I am a very active reader, but I simply cannot read every book that makes it to the movie theatres. Writing a book (a fairly isolated event) is a significantly different event than producing a movie which involves countless people and issues: screenwriters, actors, writers, directors, production people, locations, etc., etc. Making all these book to movie comparisons isn't fair to the movie or the book. Many times I just want to watch a movie and judge it on its merits alone - as a movie, period. I did not read this book, but I watched the movie and found it very entertaining and extremely absorbing.