The Sum of All Fears
dir. Phil Alden Robinson
Paramount Pictures

So just what is the sum in question? Let's add it up — the movie's positive attributes earn it points, while the strikes against it detract from its score. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The word "gravitas" may never again be used as frequently in so short a time period as it was when the reviews for The Sum of All Fears rolled in. The central question was whether Ben Affleck had it in his role as Jack Ryan, novelist Tom Clancy's analyst superhero (Intuition Man!). In what Clancy fans affectionately refer to as the Ryanverse, "Sum" occurs only two books prior to the installment in which the character becomes President of the United States, but the filmmakers have made Sum the de facto first Ryan movie by casting Affleck (who's two years younger than Alec Baldwin was when he introduced the Ryan character in The Hunt for Red October). This allows the filmmakers to dodge the gravitas question — this Ryan is less wizened, more wiseass — for awhile, and that makes Affleck's casting fine — even inspired …	+100
… But by the time Ryan comes into his own, Affleck should exhibit a more refined quality than he does — "refined" in the literal sense of having had anything extraneous in his character burned away. Instead, when he starts barking orders at people who far outclass him, you just feel embarrassed for him.	-50
Speaking of Ryan coming into his own, how are we supposed to interpret the fact that Jack Ryan gets to suffer through the death of another black mentor? Perhaps we weren't supposed to notice that Morgan Freeman's Bill Cabot performs the same function for Affleck's Ryan that James Earl Jones's Jim Greer did in the previous three Clancy pictures. The first time, it felt like casting so natural that it cheapened it to call it colorblind. But to see it happen again — particularly with a character whom Clancy not only didn't write black but didn't write whatsoever (Cabot was a screenwriter's invention to counterpoint Ryan's relative inexperience) — makes you wonder if producer Mace Neufeld (the only major holdover from the last Ryan movie) has some sort of Magical Negro complex he's working out.	-25
That said, Freeman is very good in the film, if so deeply on autopilot that you wonder if he hasn't projected his astral self somewhere else. As is Liev Schreiber, James Cromwell (who is not Donald Moffat, who played the President in Clear and Present Danger and looks just like Cromwell), Philip Baker Hall, Bruce McGill, Ron Rifkin and Ciarán Hinds.	150
Why does the film, written by Paul Attansio and Daniel Pyne, make a Clinton joke? Referencing Clinton plays havoc with the series' chronology because, if we use Ryan's age as a yardstick, that means Harrison Ford's Ryan movies took place at least 20 years after Clinton left office. I actually couldn't care less, but Clancy fans are deeply, deeply Plausible, not to mention a large, key target demographic, and they'll hate this.	-25
Speaking of pandering, let's not forget the use of Neo-Nazis as the film's villains, operating on the incredibly dubious premise that if they can make the United States and Russia destroy each other, then fascism will undoubtedly flourish in their wake. Their locked-door cabal sessions make the pasty-faced "X-Files" conspirators look rational. And it's not just that Neo-Nazis are cheap movie villains. We, the people, want to grapple with something. Some issues. We're wondering why they hate us. Meanwhile, the book's villains were, or at least included, Arab terrorists, which the filmmakers namby-pambily swore off. But we want Arab terrorists. Not because we hate Arabs, but because we want to test our tolerance, to show that we can separate ethnicity from belief system, and we want a real (or, at least, sincerely portrayed fictional) belief system to throw our own beliefs against.	-75
And that brings us to the destruction of Baltimore — an act of terrorism and mass murder that, in terms of body count, eclipses the events of Sept. 11. Judging from the film, it's hard to say if director Phil Alden Robinson, who has finished shooting Sum before the WTC/Pentagon attacks, responded to the national mood by changing this sequence a lot, a little or not at all. The baby nuke is still detonated in downtown Baltimore, but we see nothing as-it-happens from ground zero — we first see the explosion from the vantage of Ryan's doctor girlfriend, across town in a hospital, being suddenly blown off-screen, and we basically never get any closer to the action than that. It's less than we might want, but the filmmakers could have erred in the other direction, so we'll toss them a bone for the dubious merit of taste.	50
But taste is not the primary virtue that needs to be appeased. While much of the story that follows is smartly organized around quick-response military encampments, we nevertheless suffer the scene in which Ryan drives into the heart of the city to chase down a suspect; we seem him (a) run off the road by a firetruck, (b) converse with a Russian mole over a cellular-modem-enabled PDA (wouldn't those, like the oft-used cellphones, have been busted by the bomb's electromagnetic pulse?) (c) find the body of the person he'd gone to find, whose employers had taken the trouble to assassinate in the middle of a nuclear explosion and (d) be attacked by the assassin, who is for whatever reason still hanging about in Fallout Central. And what does any of this — any of this — do to progress the story? A cop who breaks up Ryan's fight offers him a ride to Washington. What do we, a viewership still reeling from recent domestic terrorism and, at least in my case, still finding new depths and magnitudes of the events of Sept. 11, want from a movie about terrorism? Not this. I don't remember any dead people in this whole sequence, with the exception of Ryan's quarry and Cabot, fatally wounded when his speeding-from-the-blast car overturns. There are no specific scenes of destruction, no moments in which we see a monument defaced or crippled by the violence — scarcely even a skyline shot. And while Ryan's sortie into the city is motivated by uncovering evidence that will help him convince the president that the Russians weren't responsible for the attack, he doesn't find any, which is atrocious story design — you realize the motivation for the whole thing is just to get Ben Affleck in a fistfight. This is not catharsis.	-75
Is it too much to expect art, even pop art, from a Tom Clancy movie? Sum's three predecessors provided it, to different degrees, succeeding by making the political personal. For instance, Clear and Present Danger may not paint a realistic portrait of the American/Colombian drug war, but it convincingly shows how the hot passions of powerful men can lay waste to the lives of the unempowered. Sum inverts this balance, disastrously — its players seem overextended in fulfilling all of their story functions, serving rather than driving the plot. Particularly by keeping its main villains on the periphery and never having them interact with the protagonists, the movie comes across as deeply passionless, with Affleck's climactic statement of purpose — "My job is to get the right information to men who make the decisions!" — inadvertently summing up how boring the proceedings often are.	-25
Finally, a question: How do you know when your movie is outdated? When the parody version of it came out 38 years ago. This is an unexploited field of filmmaking: The reverse spoof, in which scenes from a comedy are slightly reconfigured and played straight, so it seems like the comedy is poking fun at the drama. The comedy here is, of course, Dr. Strangelove, and maybe the Strangelove comparison is inevitable for any modern nuclear-war movie, but did Sum really need to ape so much of the Kubrick movie? There's the mucho macho war room scenes, the achingly polite exchanges between the US president and Russian premier/president, the airbase commander who invents his own orders and launches a strike on the rival country unbeknownst to his superiors — even the mid-air plane-refueling shot! Unfortunately — and you probably already figured this out — I don't think the filmmakers are in on the joke.	-25
Final score: the big goose egg, which is appropriate. This movie's a zero-sum game, and to say otherwise — or, specifically, to put it in the plus column — must require some pretty creative accounting.	0

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)