The Sum Of All Fears is one of many films put on the shelf after September 11th. And there’s good reason. Movies in which terrorists annihilate a U.S. city just aren’t as entertaining as they used to be.

The attack that's imagined in this movie is frightening, and seems more plausible than ever. What was originally envisioned as a warning of what might be – instead eerily reflects events that actually happened. Paramount Pictures seems to be tackling this marketing challenge head-on. Normally, I wouldn’t give away a key plot-point that occurs towards the end of a movie. But the studio is already bombarding the airwaves with TV ads featuring the nuclear blast that wipes Baltimore off the face of the Earth.

I had no such heads-up. The Sum of All Fears is one Tom Clancy novel I never got around to reading, and I saw the movie at an advance screening (the film I saw appeared to be a work-print and the closing credits were missing – so the filmmakers might still tinker with the movie between now and the release date).

Going in, I knew little about the plot. One thing I did know, was that the role of CIA analyst Jack Ryan, played previously by Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin, was now being played by Ben Affleck. I thought the age difference might be explained. It's not.

We're never told why the character is suddenly 30 years younger, or how he’s gone from being a senior analyst to working at the lowest levels of the agency. (The film is not a prequel – it takes place in present day.) And since the events of the other movies are never referred to, the only conclusion we can reach is that the movie exists in a different universe than the other Jack Ryan films.

Once that's settled, it's easy to sit back and enjoy the movie, and Affleck slides into the role quite naturally.

Age aside, Ryan is still Ryan. He's still an All-American goody-two-shoes. And he is still, somehow, the only person in the entire U.S. government who really knows what's going on in Russia. In The Hunt for Red October, he was the only guy who knew a certain submarine captain really wanted to defect. This time, he’s the only guy who just knows that the new Russian President isn’t really the hardliner that he seems.

As usual, he's right on the money. And, as usual, it's not long before the guy who’s "just an analyst" is being sent on covert missions overseas to prove it. At this point, the movie is a fairly mediocre Hollywood political-techno thriller. In fact, it’s barely thrilling at all. Instead, it strikes you as just another one of those movies where the timer on every bomb will tick down to "0:01" before the hero defuses it.

So, needless to say, I was a bit surprised when the filmmakers actually had the guts to take out a large chunk of the eastern seaboard (not to mention Camden Yards). But when they do, the movie really kicks into gear.

What follows, is smart enough, and suspenseful enough to make this easily the best movie based on a Tom Clancy novel since Red October. Particularly compelling are the scenes featuring James Cromwell as the American President who suddenly finds himself on the brink of World War III. Seeing him spar with his advisors on board Air Force One, moments after the attack, you can't help but think of what kind of conversations our current president was having after he went airborne on the morning of September 11th.

The movie might have been even closer to reality if the producers had not made one big change from the novel. I'm told that in the book, the villains were Arab terrorists. But for reasons of political correctness, the bad guys in the movie are Neo Fascists. (Note: The real villain of the film may be the tobacco industry. The nuclear bomb is planted in a cigarette vending machine, and elsewhere in the film, the use of a car cigarette lighter triggers another explosion. Message: Don't Smoke.)

Director Phil Alden Robinson is the same man who made Sneakers and he knows how make a movie like this. Robinson also puts several other fine actors in key roles, among them -- Liev Schreiber, playing a younger version of CIA assassin, John Clark. He manages to do a lot more with the character than Willem Dafoe did in Clear and Present Danger. With Schreiber in the role, I'd say it's time Clark gets his own movie.

Until then, we have The Sum Of All Fears, a movie that, despite a slow start, and despite being overshadowed by actual events, ends-up being an above average thriller.

(c) Copyright 2002