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To say The Sum of All Fears is based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name is like saying Spider-Man is based on the Electric Company cartoons of yesteryear. Clancy's 4,000 page tome tells the story of Jack Ryan, older, wiser, heavy with drink, fighting the National Security Director for the President's ear while dealing with scandals of infidelity damaging his marriage. In the book, Arab terrorists find an atomic bomb and hatch a plot to detonate said bomb beneath Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado in the middle of the Superbowl. Meanwhile, Jack dives into the midst of some heavy political intrigue as various players create a power struggle around the President. The movie tells the story of Jack Ryan, young, hip, single and sexy, no more than a researcher in the beginnings of what could be a glorious career in the CIA. In the film, right wing fascists acquire an atomic bomb with plans to detonate said bomb in Baltimore's football stadium in the middle of the Superbowl. Meanwhile, Jack looks concerned a lot and plays with other people's Palm Pilots. So it's similar, yet completely different. Kinda like The Scorpion King and The Mummy Returns, without a professional wrestler. The book is, by many accounts, Tom Clancy's finest--riveting, terrifying, engrossing. And while Jack Ryan is now thirty years younger and most of the political subplots have been altered or eliminated, the movie still kept the most dramatic part of the book: the ending. And by ending, I mean the last 150 or so pages of the book, the last 45 minutes or so of the movie. I'm talking about the "don't you dare leave your seat for some popcorn or a Coke because this is what political and military drama is all about" ending. Good stuff. First question that has to come up is: how does Ben Affleck compare to the previous incarnations of Jack Ryan, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford? Well, he's a lot younger than they are. When everyone walks around calling him Doctor, you kinda feel like they're talking about the 'examinations' he gave the Alpha Phi Sorority girls at the last kegger. Still, he's a stud-in-training, and flanked by legitimate studs such as Morgan Freeman and Liev Schreiber who do the important things like talk and shoot people. Ben's the kind of action hero who's best used as a foil for the aging hero we really came to see. Morgan Freeman is the aging hero we'd pay to see dictate HTML code. "Table width equals... one hundred percent. Border equals zero! Cellspacing equals... 2?" The story is both shocking and palatable. Shocking because, well, there are some images that we're not quite ready to see, and one of them is in this movie. Palatable because the bad guys are Nazis. Everyone hates the Nazis. Except for the Nazis, of course, and the neo-Nazis, but we don't like them because they're neo-Nazis and they like the Nazis and everyone hates the Nazis. Pretty safe villain these days, the Nazis. Actually, they're just about the only safe villain left aside from raving lunatics and the Huns. There's a ton of action for those who like a little action in the action movies. But the action serves the story, and not vice versa, which is a nice change of pace over a film such as, oh I don't know, Attack of the Clones for example. (If you were executing three people in a stadium, wouldn't you just shoot them instead of letting them kill three big pets? I mean come on, those pets have got handlers who love them!) The Sum of all Fears is a tight-paced global story of horror and hate and all that sort of good stuff that makes a movie sing. I give it 4 1/8 Babylons. Go ahead and give it whirl if you want, just pay more attention to Morgan Freeman than Ben Affleck and everything'll be fine. Shocking and palatable? Killing pets? Do I have to start drug testing? The Sum of All Fears |
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