Sum Of All Fears Mini-Review:

02 Jun, 2002 by John Hawkins

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Sum Of All Fears Mini-Review: After panning “Attack of the Clones” last week, I hate to be critical of the #1 movie yet again, but I didn’t like the “Sum of All Fears.”

Let’s review what everyone going to see the movie probably already knows: A neo-fascist tries to start a war between Russia and the United States by setting off a nuke in the US and blaming the Russians for it. The lead character in the movie tries to stop it. So what’s my beef with this movie?

Well first off, the plot is straight out of the Cold War which now seems very dated with Bush & Putin making up cute nicknames for each other and visiting each other for BBQ and borscht every few months. While we’re not quite at the point where war with Russia seems as unlikely as war with France, we’re getting there. So that takes some of the steam out of the plot.

Also, the major draw for the pic is the “nuke effects.” Everyone wants to see what a nuclear bomb going off in the US would look like right? Well you’re going to be majorly disappointed if that’s why you want to see the movie because almost all of the effects from the nuke were actually shown in the commercials. I was really surprised that they did so little with the special effects in that area considering that was the main draw for the movie.

Furthermore, the only two intriguing characters, Bill Cabot (played by Morgan Freeman) & John Clark (played by Liev Schreiber) were not the main characters in the movie. The lead character, Jack Ryan (played by Ben Affleck) wasn’t particularly interesting and didn’t really hold your attention while he was on the screen.

So to conclude, this movie felt very dated and if you’ve seen the commercials and read the most basic review of the film you know pretty much everything that’s going to happen. While this isn’t a horrible movie, it’s not that good either. Keeping in that mind, I’d have to give it a “thumbs down”.