The Sum of All Fears

It's not that we can't have terrorism movies yet [in May 2002], it's that we can't yet have escapist movies about terrorism. This distinction is made clear as a bell by the newest cinematic adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, "The Sum of All Fears." Clancy introduced many people to the idea of a commercial airliner being used as a weapon of mass destruction (in "Debt of Honor") before the rest of us were introduced to it on September 11th of last year. This is a little less surprising than you might wish; Clancy's stock in trade is the vaguely plausible end-of-the-world plot, steeped in technical and geopolitical lingo, helped along by intricate weapons and rogue geopolitical forces, and stopped by resourceful Americans named Jack.

His books, and the movies made from them, achieve entertainment without art, and for a long time that was enough. Now we need something more, and what this movie can do — hell, what it tries to do — looks feeble and pointless by comparison both to reality and to cinematic possibility.

Both Jack Ryan and Jack Clark, CIA agents extraordinaire and familiar folks in Clancy novels, make early appearances here. It's one of Ryan's first times out on the Clancy geopolitical stage, so Ben Affleck has been hired to replace long-in-the-tooth Harrison Ford in the role; Affleck does this mostly by grinning cutely and repeatedly. This early in the series, Ryan has a girlfriend rather than a wife, but she serves mainly as a pretty backdrop for when Ryan is repeatedly called away mid-smoochfest by CIA director William Cabot (Morgan Freeman).

It seems there's turmoil in Russia, occasioned by new president Nemerov and his eagerness to prosecute the Chechnya conflict. The Russian army is slipping free of Nemerov's control, and nuclear weapons appear to be ripe for the taking. Ryan wrote a paper on Nemerov, but he's about to get a lot more visceral education in power politics as he, Cabot and Clark (Liev Schrieber) try to get to the bottom of the goings-on. And get to the bottom they eventually do, but they don't find what they thought they would.

It's impossible to talk about this film intelligently without revealing a major plot point, so put down this review if you already know you're going to see "The Sum of All Fears" and like surprises: A nuclear bomb explodes in Baltimore about two-thirds of the way through the film. Appropriately, it explodes the most artificial thing yet seen in the film, a "big football game" that appears to be an unlicensed Super Bowl, complete with a team from "Florida" and garish, unreal uniforms and fans without team colors and a dome that, in Baltimore, does not exist.

But that bomb explodes, and in director Phil Alden Robinson's rendering of the explosion, the reality of it is undeniable. There is no music in this section of the film, and the governmental-security patter that led up to the explosion comes to a complete halt. The light from the explosion blazes for what seems to be an eternity. The news announcers sound authentically shaken, flat, drained to hide fear. And it is here that the film, plotted before September 11th, taps accidentally and unprovidentially into all our common dread. We know now that what we see on the screen could be real. We have learned to fear random death. The smooth, professional rush of "The Sum of All Fears" up to this point is completely disrupted. And the explosion leaves a hole that the resumption of the professional rush can't fill.

Perhaps people less sensitive than I will react differently to this film; it's about as good as "Clear and Present Danger," with somewhat more stylish direction and somewhat less stylish performances (except Freeman, who remains an underutilized treasure of American cinema). "Clear and Present Danger" did a brisk business, so perhaps it's not such a leap to think that "The Sum of All Fears" will too.

But I'm not convinced. Now that we're in a war on terrorism, we've seen that the various loose ends may not be tied up this easily, that all one's loved ones may not be safe, that all the culprits may not be apprehended. At this point in our war, in fact, we have very little narrative to cling to at all; things keep happening, as in one of those foreign movies with the open endings, but to some extent we don't have anything more to say. That's not a Jack Armstrong, Tom Clancy, apple pie-type ending, but it seems to be the truth. An escapist fantasy will always be crushed by insistent reality, and "The Sum of All Fears" can't escape or address the reality we're all being forced to learn to live with.

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