“The Sum of All Fears” is the fourth Tom Clancy book to be made into a movie, and is by far the weakest of the Jack Ryan franchise. Its disjointed storyline puts the audience to sleep and it takes the obliteration of Baltimore in a nuclear attack to grasp the viewer’s attention.
In the movie a nuclear bomb is stolen from Russia by a pan-European neo-Nazi group (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) to blow up Baltimore in order to trigger a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Meanwhile, Ryan, played unconvincingly by Ben Affleck, races to discover what happened to the missing bomb. The greatest mystery of the movie is not whether he will discover the true perpetrator of the attack (he will), or whether he will be able to stop the nuclear destruction of Baltimore (he won’t), or whether he will prevent all-out nuclear war (he will), the biggest mystery is how Ryan was able to suddenly grow 30 years younger and turned into a junior CIA agent, who just started at the agency, sans wife and kids.
The motley ensemble of neo-Nazis Euro-trash is made up of an unlikely collection of university professors and rich industrialists, who hope to increase European power by facilitating the destruction of the United States and Russia. It seems to have completely escaped their attention that Europe sits smack in between the sides and would end up bearing the brunt of the fallout from the conflict. Indeed, they never make a convincing case of how they would actually benefit from engaging in this high-risk caper, or how they could keep their part in it hidden from detection.
Those of you who are familiar with the book might not be able to remember the appearance of neo-Nazis. In the book Palestinian fanatics set off the bomb because they were angry over a U.S. settlement of the Mideast crisis. However, the Council for American-Islamic Relations launched a successful wave of protests against the studio, protesting against the stereotyping of Arabs. CAIR, which itself has supported terrorist Palestinian groups in the past, won and the protagonists were changed to European neo-Nazis. Apparently, in politically correct Hollywood, only white men can be bad guys, since they’re the only ones without a lobby. In the process, the story was robbed of any coherence, leaving the movie poorer for it.
“The Sum of All Fears” serves as a frightening example of how far censorship has come in Hollywood, when entire subject matters are placed off-limits due to the proliferation of pressure groups. Soon all the bad guys will be aliens (the extra-terrestrial, not the illegal kind).
Besides the weakness of the story, the movie suffers from an unconvincing hero in the form of Affleck. Affleck doesn’t come across very believable as either an ex-Marine captain (in one scene he is quite uncomfortable with a gun), or as someone with a doctorate in international relations. Affleck is out of his depth in this spy-thriller, his smart-alecky personality is not serious, or deep enough for the role.
This lackluster fourth installment of the series probably dooms the previously successful series, not only because Hollywood’s desire to not offend anyone will make it impossible to convert any of Clancy’s latest works to celluloid, but also because another Ryan movie with Affleck would be too horrible to imagine. Now that would be truly the sum of all our fears.
Hans Marc Hurd is an editorial intern for Carolina Journal, monthly newspaper of the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh.