THE SUM OF ALL FEARS
This is a ridiculous movie. First the casting of Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan just doesn’t make sense, chronologically (he’s already been played by the much older Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin) or physically – Affleck just isn’t commanding enough for the role. Secondly the movie is simply capitalizing on North America’s new found fear of terrorism on home turf, and thirdly the screenwriter Paul Attanasio took huge liberties with the Tom Clancy novel, including, in a stroke of misguided political correctness, changing the bad guys from Middle Eastern to Nazis. Of course everyone hates Nazis, so the filmmakers are not going to offend anyone (Hollywood finds it so hard to get good hateful villains now that Russia is no longer communist) but are we to believe that there is a worldwide conspiracy by super-rich and powerful Nazis to pit two world powers against one another? And how, after the blast (yes, there is a huge atomic explosion), does Ben Affleck piece together this entire conspiracy using only a cell phone and a palm pilot? I’m willing to suspend disbelief in most movies, but this movie has holes big enough to fly a jet through.