The Sum Of All Fears

It’s supposed to be a “thinking man’s” spy flick, but, frankly, the old Michael Caine Harry Palmer pictures of the 1960s came a lot nearer that self-same accolade. There’s more unbelievable nonsense per square inch in the film version of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears than in an Austin Powers flick. But that’s not to say that the movie is bad — even if I did spend a lot of the running time wishing someone would buy director Phil Alden Robinson a few extra lights (I haven’t seen a movie that took place in such nonstop murkiness — even in broad daylight — since, well, since Robinson’s Sneakers). The movie is, in fact, very effective at what it does — even if it falls far short of the true brink-of-disaster accomplishments of the underrated Thirteen Days and seems like something more than a kissing cousin to the late ’60s John Sturges Cold War thriller, Ice Station Zebra. If you don’t examine certain aspects of the plot — hell, most aspects of the plot — too closely, it’s a big-budget glossy suspenser with a marvelous cast that manages to occasionally cross the line into being a real nail-biter. That The Sum of All Fears happens to tap into the paranoia of the moment has propelled the movie into being taken a lot more seriously than it probably should. But the parallels between current events and this movie are only in the broadest of broad strokes and not in the specifics. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about a Neo-Nazi madman trying to start a war between the United States and Russia by detonating an elderly Israeli nuclear warhead in Baltimore. Seems the fellow wants to start World War III so he and his Nazi buddies can take over Europe. Much like Bela Lugosi’s villainous Dr. Zorka getting ready to drop a bomb that will “blow up the entire world” in the old serial The Phantom Creeps, this boy seems completely oblivious to the fact that such an event might well be detrimental to him, as well. The Nazi bad guy is played by veteran British actor Alan Bates like a man who has seen Gregory Peck’s performance in The Boys from Brazil once too often and taken it too much to heart. It does have a certain scenery-chewing panache, but it’s a character better suited to a James Bond romp than a supposedly deep thriller. In typical Hollywood anti-intellectual fashion, we know he’s the bad guy since he’s well-spoken, educated and listens to (gasp!) opera. Since the filmmakers didn’t bother to explain just how the Jack Ryan character previously played by Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin could suddenly become the 20-odd years younger Ben Affleck (and be a wet-behind-the-ears C.I.A. man in the bargain), I’m certainly not going to bother trying to figure it out. Perhaps The Sum of All Fears takes place in some kind of alternate universe. It wouldn’t be hard to make a case for that either, since it never seems to occur to anyone that if heroic Ben heroically drives and runs through the burning ruins of a post A-bomb Baltimore, he’d more likely be renting himself out as a glow-in-the-dark Baby Ben alarm clock than having a picnic with his girlfriend at the film’s conclusion. However, if you put all this aside, it’s hard not to get involved in the drama while it’s onscreen. There’s no denying that it’s very well done, with a screenplay that cleverly draws the viewer into the drama, despite the fact that it ultimately turns into a tit-for-tat series of exchanges between the U.S. president (James Cromwell, Babe) and the Russian president (Ciaran Hinds, TV’s The Mayor of Casterbridge) that amount to little more than two men wagging disturbingly phallic missiles at each other. Affleck is capable enough in the lead and, as usual, Morgan Freeman classes up the proceedings, even if his role here is a little too much like the one he played in Se7en. The nuclear destruction of a chunk of Baltimore is handled with surprising restraint and even a degree of artistry. Plus, there’s a dynamite (no pun intended) cross-cut sequence at the film’s ending set to Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot (uh oh, I just identified something from an opera — a disastrous character flaw according to this movie) where all the bits and pieces left dangling are neatly tied up. For a brief stretch there, The Sum of All Fears becomes truly creative filmmaking. For most of its length, however, it’s merely an efficient thriller that cares little for logic or reality, but on those terms it’s worthwhile.