The Sum of All Fears * Dir: Phil Alden Robinson With: Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Bates 132 mins, cert 12 www.sumofallfearsmovie.com
An evil of unimaginable proportions has been unleashed. The mind struggles to grasp it. But it's happened. A film has been released that is even more stupid than Pearl Harbor, and Ben Affleck is even worse in it than he was in Pearl Harbor. Together, actor and film form a kind of detonator-plus-nuclear-device combo which performs like a neutron bomb, boring the people in the audience to death but leaving the actual cinema and surrounding buildings standing.
Based on another of Tom Clancy's cubic bestsellers about global counter-counter-American derring-do, this has the smooth-cheeked, lantern-jawed, wooden-faced Affleck as brainy CIA tough guy Jack Ryan. (It's a role played in other Clancy adaptations by Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin. That's the cult of youth for you.) Affleck and Morgan Freeman, his omniscient yet avuncular boss at the Agency, have to save the world when a lunatic group successfully detonates a nuclear bomb in Baltimore.
Our fears about a nuclear strike traditionally include the horrific death toll, the living envying the dead, etc. But these wussy liberal "fears" do not feature in this movie's "sum". The devastation of Baltimore is seen from afar and from the air: there are no ruined buildings, and certainly no incinerated corpses. There is no nuclear winter or radiation sickness. No tactless bodycount appears on the scoreboard, because the good guys naturally score the winning touchdown. So the people of Baltimore are blithely written off.
The book is from 1991, and al-Qaida aren't responsible, however inspired they are rumoured to have been by Clancy's oeuvre since then. The bad guys aren't the Russians, but a cocktail of white South Africans and Austrian neo-Nazis. Which brings us to the most embarrassing performance: Alan Bates as a sinister Kraut, who, in uproarious Dr Evil style, actually has one faintheart in his organisation garrotted as he attempts to leave the HQ conference table. Unlike Hitler, who was brought low by fighting a war on two fronts, this nuclear-provocateur's plan is to set the Americans and Russians apocalyptically at each other's throats. "Ze Führer vos not maad!" snarls Bates, "he vos just schtoopid!" You feel like quoting The Producers: "But he vos a terrific dancer!"
