Sum of All Fears, The

• USA / Germany / Canada • 2002 • 124m •

• Directed by: Phil Alden Robinson. • Starring: Ian Mongrain, Russell Bobbitt, James Cromwell, Ken Jenkins, Bruce McGill, John Beasley, Morgan Freeman, Philip Baker Hall, Al Vandecruys, Richard Cohee, Philip Pretten, Alison Darcy, Richard Marner. • Music by: Jerry Goldsmith.

When the President of Russia dies and his replaced by a man with a cryptic past, putting the United States on alert to rising Cold War fears. When the CIA suspects that renegade Russian scientists are attempting to develop more mobile nuclear weapons, East-West tensions over flow. CIA director William Cabot sends his best agent, Jack Ryan into action. What Ryan discovers is that terrorists are planning to provoke a war between the U.S. and Russia, by detonating a nuclear bomb at a football game in Baltimore.

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Trailer

2:25

TV Spot

0:31

Review:

Image from: Sum of All Fears, The (2002)

A few years ago there was a George Clooney flick called "The Peacemaker" that had a nuke destroying a city, I think somewhere in Russia. The nuking was basically glossed over, maybe partly due to budget but chiefly, it seemed, 'cause it happened early on & wasn't really "the point." Lots of other stuff happened afterwards, but I kept wondering "Well gee whiz, what about that city that got nuked? Isn't that kinda major?" In this movie a city also gets nuked, specifically Baltimore--well okay, really it's Montreal, but leave us not quibble---& it's also basically glossed over but this time it's very much "the point." I'm spilling no beans here: the trailer shows us cars getting blown off the road by the shock wave etc. The more I think about how this was depicted, the more annoyed I get.

Ironically, this movie about a fictional disaster that was made before the real disaster of nine-eleven may get saved by the latter, because before nine-eleven, who could've remotely predicted how the country would react to hijackers flying airplanes into buildings? Yet now, 8 & a half months later, the mop-up is ceremoniously over (C-SPAN, god bless 'm, carried it live) & most of us are "getting on with our lives." So we dealt with that. So we can see this movie & think "Yeah, we could deal with this too." AND YET there's a universe of difference between the events of nine-eleven, as bad as they were, & a nuke (even if it's "low-yield") going off in a city. But you'd never guess that just from watching this movie.

THOSE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE MAY WANT TO SKIP AHEAD UNTIL THEY SEE CAPITAL LETTERS AGAIN.

...Not that I'm deliberately "spoiling" anything, but still. We don't actually "see" Baltimore get nuked; we see ancillary damage from far away, we see the famous cloud, later we see carefully edited medium-close shots of burning cars, MASH-type hospital tents, airborne debris etc. Maybe this was partly budgetary, although they seem to've pumped a crapload of money into this flick; maybe it was "artistic" less-is-more etc. That's not my chief problem with it. It's how something so unprecedented & apocalyptic gets turned into something so perfunctory & plotdriven. After the nuking, we see Affleck running around like Mannix or some other TV private eye, we see guys on Air Force One arguing, & we see guys in the Kremlin arguing. What's the effect on the whole country? What's the mood in the street, or on talk-radio, or in Congress? Does martial law get imposed? How 'bout all the corpses, all the wounded, all the families, all the residents of the city, how does the place even function? None of this gets delved into, because in the movie it doesn't matter. The nuking of an American city becomes merely a means to a story end. It's like another James Bond flick. The obligatory happy-ending with Affleck & his honey on a blanket is not just nauseating, it's insulting. "Hey honey, let's go celebrate our engagement tonight, I know lots of great places that WEREN'T recently destroyed by an atomic blast....." Oh by the way, we're informed the radiation all conveniently blew out to sea, so THAT'S not even an issue. Gee whiz, makes ya wonder what those wimpy Japanese were complaining about all those years, didn't they sell lots of cars & TVs afterwards???.....

OKAY, IT'S 'SAFE' TO READ AGAIN NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE.

Why do I dwell on this? 'Cause but for the nuking, this would just be another stupid thriller, & not even an intelligently executed stupid thriller. Start with the villains---neo-Nazis???? Jeezus, not AGAIN???? Didn't we already kill Laurence Olivier in "Marathon Man" years ago? The movie doesn't even follow through on its own goofy premise: we see a handful of Europeans sitting around in a hotel room like the evil conspiracy guys in the "X-Files" movie, only instead of Armin Mueller-Stahl it's Alan Bates with an accent, chortling how fascists all over the world can now work together via the Internet etc., yet they're hatching a plot that would result in millions of Americans & Russians being killed, WHICH WOULD SEEM TO INCLUDE ALL THE NEO-FASCISTS IN THOSE COUNTRIES, WOULDN'T IT, SO I GUESS IT'S A PRETTY STUPID PLAN, ISN'T IT. Nuclear war between America & Russia would render Europe largely uninhabitable, & make it hard to get those cigarettes the bad guys're constantly smoking, & the really nice cars they drive, & the vintage wine they drink. Umpteen other scenes strain credulity horrendously, e.g. when the cloak-&-dagger guy single-handedly invades the Ukraine, etc. etc. Reminds me what Stanley Kauffmann wrote about the "corruption of realism" in movies---they get the trappings down to a T, while asking us to swallow these whoppers.

This could've been a fun movie or a harrowing one, could've been "Fail Safe" or "Dr Strangelove," but it ultimately wants to be a geopolitical "Field of Dreams" without a lead even as charismatic as Kevin Costner to carry it off. I don't even care about previous Jack Ryan movies, I haven't read Clancy's books, I'd rather just watch C-SPAN, & I did enjoy the movie's reference to it. But darn it, they go to so much trouble about Detail & in the supposed Super Bowl game, the 2 teams are wearing clearly non-NFL insignia. Why not just have the announcer speak French while they were at it?

Also enjoyed Cromwell's "nuke-ya-lur," a little dig at Bush I presume.

Review by fred-287 from the Internet Movie Database.