Nothing to Fear

He's a nice guy, an average guy, a guy just like you. But better. He's Jack Ryan, perennial do-gooder and unintentional American hero extraordinaire, preserving your right to freedom. In The Sum of All Fears, the fourth film adaptation to date of a Tom Clancy novel, Ben Affleck stars as Ryan's third cinematic incarnation, following Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford and surpassing both in good old-fashioned aesthetic appeal.

Ryan is a shiny-eyed academic turned-CIA agent--a political virgin--dragged across the river and plunked squarely in the political ring by an unprecedented string of events. Terrorists (conspicuously ambiguous in origin and intent) plant a recovered Israeli nuke on American soil to simulate a Russian first-strike scenario and thus send the world's two nuclear superpowers hand-in-hand down the path to mutually assured destruction. Ryan, naturally, is the only one sharp enough to pierce the bureaucratic haze and realize that both sides are being played. What should be an impossible international disaster instead plays like a game of checkers for the politically inept: your move, our move, your moveÉ.

Clancy's novels, though not exactly giving Faulkner a run for his money, are solid fare compared to the insubstantial fluff favored by the masses in these lean literary times. Fulfilling yet subtle, the genius of his novels lies in the interplay of details, details and more details merging impossibly into grandiose, tightly woven plots with nary a loose end in sight. It comes as no surprise, then, that the finer points of a densely written Clancy extravaganza pass through the average reader faster than a 'Dillo burrito with extra beans. Hence, the transition from big book to big screen is a traumatic pruning that leaves most Clancy fans a bit bewildered.

The intricacy of a fabulously complex plot is smoothed down and greased with special effects to slide down the gullet of a public easily impressed with romantic comedies and slam-bang-where-the-hell's-the-plot action flicks. The Sum of All Fears is effective, even good, but falls short of its literary potential.

Some have deemed the movie inappropriate, with terrorism looming large over an edgy public. The film blurs the line between fiction and reality, turning the public's hidden fears into glaring phobias and paving the way for paranoia. As always, Hollywood sure knows what sells: two parts fear, one part adrenaline, some really big explosions, and liberal dashes of gratuitous patriotism.