Sum of All Fears, The

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair.

Variety Robert Koehler

Director Phil Alden Robinson -- has done just about everything he can do to build a sleek, involving and -- for a few minutes -- terrifying movie that can get viewers past the young Ryan factor.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Smartly directed, grown-up film of ideas -- with a debonair script by Paul Attanasio (Donny Brasco) and Daniel Pyne.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The movie does what all good thrillers should do -- provide enough shocks and surprises to keep us guessing, and never lets up on the suspense until the end credits arrive.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Impossible to watch passively. It may be a work of pure fiction, with the requisite preposterous plot turns, but it still has the air of a ''what if?'' scenario, and it is perfectly, thoroughly chilling.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A middlebrow hybrid that should satisfy most fans of spy movies without blowing them away.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

All told, it's a reasonably effective movie, but it might have been a lot more effective had it the guts to portray a Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden-like character as its villain instead of this rather unbelievable, but more politically correct, gaggle of cardboard neo-Nazis.

Chicago Reader Ted Shen

Screenwriters Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne stick to Clancy's sure-fire formula -- building tension from the political infighting behind a worsening crisis.

Film Threat Michael Dequina

Smart, complex, and engrossing idea-driven action thriller.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Has vast scope, unflagging energy, a rousing Jerry Goldsmith score and a horrendous disaster sequence that conveys much in discreet fashion in keeping with post-Sept. 11 sensibilities yet is needlessly evasive in telling us the precise extent of its magnitude.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

A world-detonation thriller, at once urgent and lazy, that benefits from its connection to current events and also, by the end, suffers from it.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The tension is so plausibly high that you're eager to see how it winds up. Eager enough, in fact, to forgive Jack Ryan for reversing the aging process and winding up as Ben Affleck.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A popcorn movie with a protein center, satisfying neither taste.

The New Yorker David Denby

As an evocation of danger, the movie seems threatening yet is nowhere near serious or intelligent enough to satisfy our current sense of alarm. [3 June 2002, p. 100]

Boston Globe Renee Graham

And then there's Liev Schreiber as CIA operative John Clark. With less than 30 minutes of screen time, he's everything Affleck isn't - magnetic, clever, and delightful to watch. If only the filmmakers had possessed the courage to cast the splendid Schreiber instead of the feeble Affleck.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

How's this for frightening: The casting of the lightweight Ben Affleck as a CIA agent who holds the fate of the entire world in his pretty-boy hands. Can't deny it, that got my heart pumping like a bunny.

New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky

When Affleck keeps getting work, the terrorists HAVE won. With blank eyes and soft features, he has none of the gravitas of his predecessors, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, who saved the world with swagger. Affleck merely looks like a frat boy in over his head, which is perhaps the point.

USA Today Mike Clark

Mediocre terrorist melodrama turned even punier by real-life events, and that's before we scratch our heads at its lead-actor choice.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Yet there's no getting around one awkward fact. The picture, which turns on a cataclysmic act of terrorism within U.S. borders, was made for a different audience from the one that's about to see it.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Fortunately, even when star and story are ineffectual, Fears' supporting players are all thrilling, especially Morgan Freeman.

Newsweek David Ansen

Poor Affleck. He doesn’t just have to singlehandedly save the world from nuclear destruction, he has to erase our memories of Ford and Baldwin. That’s a tall order for any actor, and Affleck, an expert at playing cocky, callow yuppies, just doesn’t have the heft.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

At once too real for escapism and too ridiculous for a credible espionage thriller, The Sum Of All Fears unfolds like a cruel joke and treats imagined human tragedy as the punchline.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Should carry all the urgency of a film that captures, magnifies and elaborates on the anxieties of its time. Luckily, that movie has already been made: It's called "Dr. Strangelove," and it's available at a video store near you.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Film's real sticky wicket is that the bad guys not only threaten to nuke a major American city but do it — a conceit that might have been more amusing before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center using hijacked commercial jets. Witnesses said the WTC attack looked like a movie; they didn't say it was a movie they wanted to see.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A moribund attempt to exhume the Jack Ryan techno-thriller franchise with a severely miscast Ben Affleck, is truly the 20-megaton bomb among this summer's blockbusters.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

The jerry-rigged result is a trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

How the hell did Ben Affleck, 29, wind up replacing Harrison Ford, 59, as our hero? Who's next as Ryan -- Ozzy Osbourne's guppy son, Jack? Chronology hasn't been this royally fucked with since Memento.