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Doesn't All Add Up in 'THE SUM OF ALL FEARS' Reviewed
by Graham H. Moes
You don't have to be a Tom Clancy aficionado to realize something odd is going on in The Sum of All Fears. Anyone who has seen the three previous Clancy novels adapted to film will be scratching their heads at least over the transformation of protagonist Jack Ryan. A mature Alec Baldwin played the analyst-turned-action hero in The Hunt for Red October, and a seasoned Harrison Ford played him in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. This time, although the action takes place in 2002, Ryan is inexplicably young again. Like a Looney Tunes cartoon, the start of a new Ryan film apparently wipes clean all the backstory and damage done in previous offerings. Far from the guessing game over new baby names featured in earlier films, Jack, played this time by fresh-faced and ubiquitous Ben Affleck, has only just met the future Mrs. Ryan. And far from the CIA director he's become at this point in the books, he is once again the pie-eyed newbie lacking the security clearance to get him a ham sandwich in D.C., let alone access to the stuff he needs to know to save humanity from certain destruction. If this is where the playing fast-and-loose with "reality" ended, the film might be forgiven. In fact — though it feels like a cop-out allowing the filmmakers to cut-and-paste Jack Ryan from his Red October days — it's amusing when Ryan's explanation for missing dinner with his girl gets him hung-up-on with extreme prejudice. (He's only calling from a plane en route to Russia for a nuclear weapons inspection with the head of the CIA. Why can't she be more reasonable?) And as part of the story requires him to fail in saving much of humanity from certain destruction, the need for his character to regress into a past life makes sense. More troublesome, however, are the liberties taken with the core of the story. The book dealt with Arab terrorists securing a nuclear device for use against the West in retaliation for our support of Israel. Timely material, right? Absolutely. And the film's depiction of this device being smuggled into and activated in the heart of a major U.S. city is the most sobering and terrifying 15 minutes of film you're likely to see for years to come. Such a thing could happen. It probably will happen. Seeing it happen allows the film to transcend its mere "movieness" and touch its post-9/11 audience in a way that is extremely rare. Then comes the realization that the filmmakers — laboring under pre-9/11 political correctness during principal photography earlier last year — recast the villains as wealthy, white, neo-Nazi types, and you crash-land right back into Hollywood. Shallow, gutless, clueless Hollywood. We can only assume it was out of fear of being accused of racial profiling — that highest of all sins — that such changes were made. Multicultural tolerance specifically embracing the Middle East was on the rise in Hollywood before 9/ll, as evidenced by films like The Siege, which dealt with the right problem while still managing to lay the blame at Western feet, and Oliver Stone's new political documentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Begun long before recent developments, Stone's film, reportedly cozying up to Yasser Arafat, was only recently completed. Not surprisingly, he has yet to find a distributor. Sorry, but the threat of a wealthy industrialist reclaiming Hitler's throne by provoking the United States and Russia into World War III just isn't high on the list of world intelligence concerns. While right-wing violence is reportedly on the rise in Europe, it's primarily among the poorer classes of former Eastern Bloc countries, not the board of directors of BMW. The movie's scenario thus rings as true as a cardboard bell. Strange, given that fact that the often prophetic and right-leaning Clancy co-produced this one himself after having well-publicized problems with the handling of his previous novels. So despite great performances from Morgan Freeman (better than James Earl Jones playing, essentially, the same sort of role as Ryan's mentor) and the incomparably presidential James Cromwell (The Green Mile, L.A. Confidential, Babe), The Sum of All Fears only manages to hold us part of the time. While much has obviously changed in our world since New York, we have yet to see what changes have occurred in Hollywood, given the time required to put together a feature film. Here's hoping for something more satisfying than this. Until then, rent Patriot Games; and remember how good a Clancy tale can be, and hopefully will be, again.
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