In order to rebuild a fascist empire in Europe, a group of Austrian Neo-Nazis try to start a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia by releasing a homemade nuke in Baltimore.
It is up to newly-regenerated Time Lord Jack Ryan to prove that device was not Russian before the two sides go to war.
The Sum of All Fears. I ignored it for years, thinking it would be terrible.
Instead, it turned out to be fine.
A fine thriller and a decent Jack Ryan movie. Maybe that is its greatest flaw.
Clear and Present Danger was a big hit in 1994 and plans for a follow-up began. And stalled. Repeatedly throughout the 1990s, until in 2000 when Sum of All Fears was chosen. In the same year, established creatives Philip Noyce and Harrison Ford backed out due script problems - I am guessing it had to do with the villains of the novel.
After Noyce and Ford departed, the higher-ups opted for a complete clean slate - the only person to return was producer Mace Neufeld, who was in charge of the previous films.
Ben Affleck replaced Ford as a younger, greener version of Jack Ryan, with Bridget Monahan as his wife Cathy; Morgan Freeman plays CIA director William Cabot, Liev Schrieber replaced Willem Dafoe as John Clark, James Cromwell played a new president, and celebrated British thespian Alan Bates played the dastardly Neo-Nazi villain, in one of his final performances.
Behind the camera was Phil Alden Robinson. Robinson’s most famous credits are Field of Dreams and Sneakers, another movie about espionage with a decidedly different tone.
Written by Daniel Pyne and Paul Attanasio - Attanasio’s most well-known credits are Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco while Pyne has numerous credits including the thriller Pacific Heights, Any Given Sunday, The Manchurian Candidate remake and lately has been writing for the TV show Bosch.
The novel Sum of All Fears is a sequel to Clear and Present Danger. However it came out in 1991, and the original antagonists were Palestinians supported by East Germans. It was decided to replace the villains with Neo-Nazis.
The movie came out in May 2002, to mixed reception - partially down to the plot and coming out so close after 9/11. It made $193 million on a $68 million budget - a modest success, but not enough to justify continuing the Affleck variant.
Sum of All Fears came out at the worst possible time - post-9/11, in the middle of the backlash to Ben Affleck, and just before the movie that would re-orient the spy genre for the next decade and change, The Bourne Identity.
Despite the change in crew, and the passage of time since the last Ford movie, it is amazing how much this instalment retains the house style of the previous movies - top-notch cast; lack of flash; focus on process.
This film also feels more like an ensemble piece than the Noyce double.
Affleck's casting as Ryan is fine. It feels like he needed more screen time - to be more specific, he needed more agency in this story bc the script does not give him the key decisions.
There is something weirdly unlikeable about Affleck as a Boy Scout - there is something insincere, or at least more knowing, than the way he is trying to come across. That is why his casting in Gone Girl is so great.
While a completely different interpretation from Willem Dafoe, Schreiber's Clark is effective, and rather imposing. He is believable as someone who can slip in and out of situations, and comes off a little underused.
Alan Bates is a great actor but his casting as the villainous Hessler feels cartoonish. I think this element of the plot is heightened and his accent is a little too much for the verrisimilitude of the movie
The movie is deadly earnest for most of its runtime. There are two moments of real levity - Cabot telling Ryan to let his wife know what his real job is, and the President (James Cromwell) reacting to boos from a crowd with a muttered "It's showtime".
While the movie does by and large feel like it is maintaining the verisimilitude of its predecessors, there are also some moments that fee a little obvious - the reveal of the swastika on the watch - or contrived to make the movie more exciting: Philip Baker Hall's war hawk dying of a heart attack; Ryan getting into a fight with the henchman in the warehouse.
While the movie is watchable throughout, the third act is the strongest aspect of the piece - there is some good heightening of tension, with some actual escalation (the attack on the aircraft carrier). The film takes the danger of nuclear proliferation seriously, and how much of this threat comes down to flawed humans working off limited information and heightened emotion.
With its focus on detente and the post-cold war consensus, the movie feels like a take-off on the politics of the nineties. Sadly, thanks to the passage of time, it is weirdly prescient for right now. At the time, the Neo-Nazis seemed ridiculous - but Bates’ speech about the rise of a new reich carries a weight it probably did not at the time.
Knowing that the first Bourne movie came out the same year gives this movie an added sense of elegy - the context for these movies had passed. Ryan fights with system because he believes in it and is ultimately a part of it; Jason Bourne rejects it, and that gelled with the overall feeling in the noughties.
Here was a new character for a new, and uncertain age.
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