Eerie how it is relevant so much today.
Rewatching The Sum of All Fears now
- Thread starter AProudLefty
- Start date
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Totally ridiculous having Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan. Hollywood has no shame whatsoever, we are supposed to believe that Ryan has transmogrified into a nerdy, unmarried, wet behind the ears CIA employee. Are we supposed to just forget about Harrison Ford or Alex Baldwin?
The character isn't married?
cancel2 2022
Canceled
'Fears' sums up as a thriller with poignant warning
CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck, left), his boss William Cabot (Morgan Freeman) and General Saratkin (Lev Prygounov) have the daunting task of discerning who's behind the theft of a U.S. nuclear bomb.
As the first big Hollywood movie in the wake of 9/11 to deal with a terrorist attack on the United States -- and the first ever to deal with a successful nuclear terrorist attack -- "The Sum of All Fears" has a lot more sting than your average Tom Clancy thriller.
Even with a forced cheerful ending, absurdly unrealistic villains, somewhat clumsy plot mechanics and a script that blithely ignores the long-term problems of radiation poisoning, the film transcends the action genre to be a sobering wake-up call.
Its story line deals with the chain of events that ensue when an American-made nuclear bomb that went down with an Israeli jet back in 1973 is uncovered by Bedouins in the desert, acquired by a black-market arms dealer and sold to a band of sneering European crypto-fascists.
Clancy hero Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) gets involved because he's the CIA's expert on the new Russian president who has been acting very strangely of late and appears to the clueless U.S. president (James Cromwell) and his Keystone Kop advisers to be the villain of the piece.
With Affleck assuming Harrison Ford's role of Ryan, the franchise has been thrown into a bizarre time warp: The setting is still contemporary but the middle-age family man of "Clear and Present Danger" and "Patriot Games" is suddenly a twenty something bachelor!
And the whole first hour of the movie is as tedious and disconnected as these affairs get: Ryan creeping around Russia with no clear purpose, unidentified government officials yelling at one other, strange people conspiring in dark rooms.
But once the unthinkable happens, the movie kicks into high gear, and director Phil Alden Robinson ("Field of Dreams") gives us a chilling lesson in a distinct possibility, perhaps even inevitability, of any prolonged terrorist war on the new world order.
To its credit, the movie doesn't try to exploit its nuclear explosion with any "Independence Day" knock-down-the-landmarks ghoulishness.
https://www.seattlepi.com/entertain...ms-up-as-a-thriller-with-poignant-1088365.php
You're right. He wasn't married. But at the end of the movie, they got engaged and the spy gave them a gift, surprising them because how could he possibly know.