Review: ‘Sum of All Fears’ hits too close to home

Geoff Carter

Friday, May 31, 2002 | 9:23 a.m.

'Sum of All Fears'

Grade: ** 1/2

Starring: Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell and Alan Bates.

Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne.

Director: Phil Alden Robinson.

Rated: PG-13 for violence, disaster images and brief strong language.

Running time: 127 minutes.

Movie times: http://www.vegas.com/movies/

Idon't read Tom Clancy's novels, but the films made from them are more or less pornographic: They fetishize events that shouldn't be fetishized. No one in their deepest confusion would confuse a James Bond movie with reality, but Clancy's stories have always pretended to be part of our world, juggling real-life elements such as drug cartels and nuclear weapons and periodically dropping one, leaving the CIA to clean it up.

I've enjoyed the films to varying degrees. "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger" were slight, but made worthwhile by the performances: Harrison Ford is CIA analyst Jack Ryan, for good or ill, and you need him to center these pictures. "The Hunt for Red October" is the best of the bunch, and it belongs to Sean Connery -- Alec Baldwin's Ryan barely registers until Connery begins playing off of him. All told, they're decent films -- but released as they were in peacetime, I never gave a thought to what they meant to say.

"The Sum of All Fears," directed by Phil Alden Robinson ("Field of Dreams"), doesn't have the luxury of being simple entertainment. Its basic premise, in which a terrorist detonates a nuclear bomb in the continental United States, would have seemed ludicrous before last fall; today the sum of all those fears actually add up to something, and even the most casual observer must wonder what Clancy knew and when he knew it.

"Fears" plays too close for comfort, which is kind of a shame, because it's the best film of Clancy's material since "Red October." The Ryan role is transformed to accommodate young star Ben Affleck, who plays the hotshot CIA analyst with the rumpled good nature of a dot-com refugee. He works in the Agency's basement with a group of fellow second-guessers, betting on the outcome of world events until, one day, he's summoned into the middle of them.

I can't say enough good things about Morgan Freeman. His name above the title automatically adds a star to my grade.

As CIA director Bill Cabot, Freeman lends the same firepower to "Fears" that Connery gave to "October" -- an authority and dry humor that lets you know that this is really the guy in charge, no matter where he stands in the chain of command. When he pulls Ryan out of his basement ("You're about to breathe air that's way over your pay grade") he takes charge of the picture, and Affleck's performance, too.

It's not that Affleck is out of his depth. The Kevin Smith acolyte suprises me with every new role, and he may yet mature into a Harrison Ford, who himself continues to grow as a performer. But Affleck's role, past a certain point, requires him to do more reacting than acting; he spends the last half of the film barking cliches into a cellular phone ("The bomb is in play!"). Freeman, on the other hand, has room to stretch, and he uses it to its fullest.

A few other actors turn in high-quality work. Alan Bates is chilling in his short scenes as a neo-Nazi terrorist, and Robinson pulls off a neat trick in revealing the terrorist's alliances by zooming in on his wristwatch, emblazoned with a swastika. Liev Schreiber plays a field operative so dispassionate about his job that he doesn't even listen to Ryan's briefing; instead, he admires the analyst's Palm Pilot.

There is an explosion in "The Sum of All Fears" that may stir memories of last fall's brutal attacks (the trailer reveals as much). It almost seems unnecessary given what follows it -- a Cold War thriller of the first order -- but it no longer seems outrageous that it could happen. Perhaps that's what may spell the end of Clancy's career in media -- on the fiction side of the fence, at least. 0001.