Here’s the thing about The Sum of All Fears: I’d largely forgotten it. Poof. Gone. Like a rogue agent swallowed whole by the bureaucratic machinery of the CIA. Re-watching it, I was struck, not by the oh-so–2002 anxieties of nuclear terrorism, but by how strangely empty the whole thing felt. It’s a film striving for Clancy-esque gravitas, for the intricate ticking clock of geopolitical tension, but ending up like a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing.
This is a movie caught in a weird limbo. There’s just no other way to say it: Ben Affleck’s Jack Ryan is perpetually overshadowed by the ghost of Harrison Ford. He’s not bad, per se. He’s got that Affleck charm, that movie-star wattage. But he’s miscast, like a finely tailored suit on the wrong body. It subtly, insidiously, throws the whole thing off. Yes, this is a younger Ryan. But Afflec is not a younger Ford.
Our villains are a pre–9/11 fever dream of neo-Nazis swirling their brandy snifters and plotting… something. It’s so Bond-villain-lite that it’s almost funny. The irony is that in trying to avoid one geopolitical hot potato the filmmakers landed squarely in another: narrative incoherence.
Then there’s the administrivia. The sheer inability of characters to connect, the endless loop of “I can’t get ahold of him!” is baffling. Lazy narrative? Sure. It’s also a sign that the filmmakers themselves were lost in the bureaucratic maze they were trying to depict and landed on the one sure-fire way to throw in a roadblock to build tension: make the phones broke.
Amidst this mess, there are sparks. Liev Schreiber’s John Clark, for example, is a beacon of quiet competence in a film desperately needing some. He’s the character I remember, the one that hints at the taut thriller The Sum of All Fears could have been.
So, three stars. Not because it’s actively terrible, but because it’s a film of missed opportunities. Like a half-remembered dream, it leaves you with a nagging sense of “what if?” What if they’d stuck with the book’s plot? What if they’d cast Schreiber as Ryan? What if, what if, what if… .