Sum Of All Fears...Horrible Beyond Words

tell us how you really feel. ; )

"Completely full of false info in the case of these actual events and it made anyone who was on the right wing seem like they prayed for doomsday. "

Right wing????Who was right wing? The Neo-Nazi's? You weren't classifying them as right wing? Were you?

The movie is a cowardly liberal bed-wetting PC bucket of slop as well as an abhorrent betrayal of the true nature and aspect of the book: middle eastern Islamic fundamental terrorism as a threat to the US. Of course as we all know too well, that would be "racial profiling", so whitey must assume the role of bad guy once again.

Damn! Now that's a critigue...thanks for the heads-up.

Thanks for the ping. I think I'll just take the time to sit and read the book again rather than go and see how they've twisted the movie around.

Here's an idea: Why don't the "outed" conservatives in Hollywood like Schwartzenegger, Selleck, Willis, Woods, etc., pool their money and resources and start a new studio?

Great idea!! I refuse to even rent movies featuring the liberal ilk of Alec Baldwin, et al.

Thanks for the info.
Any movie that is this "politically correct" is a movie I will not see and my kids will not see.
Hollywood is disgusting.

Second movie in my life that I walked out of in the middle.

I can accept one or two implausable events early in the movie, to make the rest of the movie work. I don't like it much. But, I can accept it. What I cannot deal with, is the repeated implausable events that plague "Sum Of All (Liberal) Fears".

I actually even managed to get my money back without any trouble! I got the feeling that I wasn't the first.

Thanks for the Ping. It's good to read about the movie, and NOT WASTE MY MONEY seeing it. I love to read Clancy, I know there is no way to do his book's justice on the big screen, but they have to be SO *UCKING PC ABOUT IT!!

Then I heard they were going to change the plot to keep from offending the arabs and muslims who had just knocked down the Twin Towers....Thanks for confirming my decision to boycot the movie.

I'm boycotting it as well, because they changed the bad guys from Arab Muslims to "rightwingers". We aren't neo-Nazis (I hope!), but "rightwingers" is US!!

Then I heard they were going to change the plot to keep from offending the arabs and muslims who had just knocked down the Twin Towers.

From what I understand, the movie was already in the can when 9/11 happened. They just delayed its release until well after.

For those who have read the book, don't look for anything resembling it, except for the fact that the nuke blew up in the US. The writers changed just about everything. That being said, I enjoyed the movie for what it was, an action movie, of which I'm a big fan. I stopped trying to compare it to the book, in fact I was having a hard time remembering the smaller events in the book. I'll have to go back and read it. Fut for those who have never read it, and I'm sure that's most people who go to the movies, it makes for an exciting night out.

Ben Affleck wasn't bad as Jack Ryan, a damn sight better than Alec Baldwin, but we've just been spoiled by Harrison Ford. And for those who object to Ben Affleck because of his politics, Harrison Ford's are just about the same, we're just more used to him as Jack Ryan. And I like Liev Schreiber as John Clark, but Willem Dafoe has imprinted on my brain in that part, and it's hard to shake the image!!

They sure are promoting this movie on Fox News, they talk about it probably once an hour.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the critique I heard on Michael Medved, that inexplicably Jack Ryan lost twenty years in age and no longer has a wife and kids!

Thanks for the heads up, guess I'll stay home and mop this kitchen floor instead.

It is a movie not a docu-drama. It wasa bit weak in some areas, but they tried to keep it under 5 hours. It was entertaining, but not as good as I was hoping it would be.

I almost always avoid flicks that are PC enough to irritate me. I figured this one to be as much after the change of bad guys to universally despised whiteys. What a joke right? Arab terrorists launch a massive terrorist strike against our civilian populace and we are afraid to cast them as bad guys....we are soft as putty and will deserve our fate(rotting from the inside) when it comes if we don't wake up.

We know it's a movie, but with Clancy, my all-time favorite author, his novels are filled with such intricate true information. He has such detail that intelligence sources sometimes wonder how he acquired it. This is what we expect from the movie.

Remember, when you get in the chair, tell him , "High and tight"!

Wow! That bad..

It`s based on Clancy`s book.

Haven't seen it, probably won't, but from what I've heard it is not very true to the book. Apparently it substitutes Nazi types for the real bad guys...Islamic fundamentalists. And why couldn't they keep a Denver Super Bowl as the target? Why Baltimore?

The book is a great read.



May 31, 2002

FILM REVIEW By JOE MORGENSTERN

'Sum of All Fears' Plays on Insecurity,
And Insults Our Intelligence

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In "The Sum of All Fears," terrorists explode an atom bomb during a Super Bowl game in Baltimore. They're not Muslim fanatics, though, but neo-Nazis. And the larger issue is not the bomb itself but whether the terrorists will be able to use its detonation to provoke all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Does their logic sound cockeyed or weirdly dated? It's only one of many aberrations, evasions and confusions in a tortured reworking of the Tom Clancy novel that stars Ben Affleck as a Gen-X Jack Ryan (younger than Harrison Ford, and suddenly unencumbered by a family), and Morgan Freeman as the director of the CIA. Instead of a recognizable reflection of the perilous present -- and the action is unmistakably set in the present -- we have the sum of all Cold War clichés. [Portrait of Morgan Freeman]

I suppose some sympathy is in order here for the director, Phil Alden Robinson, and all the sorcerer's apprentices who struggled, both before and after Sept. 11, to make this film a marketable commodity, one that would excite audiences without scaring them to death. Originally Mr. Ford was supposed to play Jack Ryan yet again, then he was gone. Originally, in the Clancy novel, the terrorists were Palestinians, but then fears of ethnic stereotyping -- shared, as we've recently learned, by the real-life FBI -- prompted the preposterous switch to European fascists, plus a muddled subplot that has a shaky Russian government seeming to threaten the NATO alliance with nuclear annihilation. (And this in a movie opening two days after NATO's embrace of Russia as a junior partner!)

Originally, or so it would appear from what's still on screen, "The Sum of All Fears" included scenes of mass destruction in the American homeland. But then they were sanitized, presumably in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, to bewilderingly inconsistent effect. A mushroom cloud rises above Baltimore, and vast shock waves spread from ground zero, yet we see little of the ensuing carnage, and life goes on, however frantically, in nearby Washington.

It should be said that half of "The Sum of All Fears" -- roughly the first hour -- works reasonably well as an action adventure leavened by humor and romance. Mr. Affleck's Jack Ryan is not only more youthful than his previous incarnations but more callow, in a cheerful way; he's as much of a wise guy as Mr. Freeman's superspy is genuinely wise and wittily taciturn. But the nuclear blast sends the movie careering out of control, and Ryan scurrying around the afflicted nation, and the world, as the only one who can forestall humanity's final folly. The deeper the action descends into show-biz foolishness, the sillier Mr. Affleck looks, though he's not the only one; Liev Schreiber, a fine actor in most circumstances, also pops into international hotspots as a CIA cloak-and-daggerist who's all-seeing, all-knowing and all-peeping.

I wish all of "The Sum of All Fears" could be dismissed as show-biz foolishness, but there are times when fiction films collide with reality and must be judged accordingly. The reality of the moment is already fearful. Almost daily, it seems, someone tells us that a terrorist strike with a nuclear device in an American city is all but inevitable. Confronting that horrendous eventuality will be hard enough. The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.