Also this issue:

Of Boards and Boys
A fond look back at the birth of skateboarding.
-Cindy Fuchs

Day of the Dead
Local wunderkind Andrew McElhinney's A Chronicle of Corpses finally gets its day in the sun.
-Sam Adams

repertory film

Screen Picks

Showtimes

May 30-June 5, 2002

movies

Nukes? Nah.

affleck in the pan: Ben Affleck’s at 14:59 and counting, everybody!

The latest Tom Clancy flick tells improbable tales of things that already haven’t happened.

The Sum of All Fears

by Cindy Fuchs

The Sum of All FearsDirected by Phil Alden Robinson A Paramount release Opens Friday at area theaters

Action-packed, full of elaborate plots, exotic locations, and itself, the fourth Jack Ryan movie is, more than anything else, alarmingly out of date. While it may be pretty to imagine that the CIA does a bang-up job of monitoring terrorists, Nazi plots and wayward nuclear devices, not to mention old Cold War adversaries, the truth is that faith in the Agency was waning long before Sept. 11.

But no matter. Logic, narrative or temporal, is largely irrelevant in the Jack Ryan universe. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson (Sneakers), The Sum of All Fears provides backstory for Ryan (this time played by Ben Affleck, following Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford). You learn how he came by his reputation as the CIA's super-analyst, mainly, it appears, by interpreting events in ways that none of his superiors believe, then going around them to make nice with the wily new Russian president, Nemerov (Ciarán Hinds), whom they all assume is a shifty bastard, because they're all living in the Cold War, where they're most comfortable. Ryan knows better, because he's written a paper on the guy. And his mentor, sagacious CIA chief Bill Cabot (Morgan Freeman), knows better because, well, he has faith in his mentee.

Young Ryan is cocky, smart, and a workaholic, though he's just started dating the pretty and infinitely patient doctor, Cathy Muller (Bridget Moynahan), who will eventually become his wife. Since you know he's going to live for at least two more movies, it's hard to be too worried by the many clear and present dangers that pop up -- say, a nuclear warhead that's been missing since the Israelis lost it in the desert in 1973. He can't die. Shoot, he can't even be seriously maimed.

And so, Jack Ryan persists -- even, preposterously, in the face of nuclear holocaust. But then, Tom Clancy novels and the movies they spawn have never had much truck with credibility. Stretching possibilities this time out, Alan Bates plays Dressler, an Austrian neo-Nazi with a ferocious grudge against the axis that beat down Hitler and lots of cash to spend. He hunts down the missing nuke, steals some Russian scientists, and sets up WWIII (pitting the hopelessly clueless and hawkish U.S. against the more moderate-seeming Russia), by smuggling the aforementioned nuclear bomb in to the Super Bowl in Baltimore, which U.S. President Fowler (James Cromwell) happens to be attending, as a display of national "unity" and confidence.

Such a tactic now hardly looks as farfetched as it might have when the film was made. But its result stretches the film's believability factor considerably, in that nearby key characters survive the blast (which you've already seen in trailers), including Ryan and increasingly grumpy Fowler, who's pushed quite over the edge by his assailants' sheer nerve, not to mention their devious excess. "They fucking tried to kill me!" he points out, by way of explaining his decision to seek serious vengeance against the Russians (whom, of course, have not actually done the deed). Predictably, Jack's day-saving looks fairly anti-climactic after this special-effects jamboree.

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