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Sum of All Fears, The
Paramount Pictures


6.6

based on 35 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 29 votes
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MPAA RATING: PG-13 for violence, disaster images and brief strong language

Starring Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber, Alan Bates, Philip Baker Hall, Bruce McGill, and Jamie Harrold

Ben Affleck stars as Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan in this thriller about European neo-Nazi terrorists who acquire a nuclear device that they plan to use at the Super Bowl.

GENRE(S):	Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Paul Attanasio Daniel Pyne Tom Clancy (novel)
DIRECTED BY:	Phil Alden Robinson
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: October 29, 2002 Video: October 29, 2002 Theatrical: May 31, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	124 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 29 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Jared B. gave it a9:
When I heard that a movie was being made based on another of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, I was thrilled. This one concerns a plot by a group of terrorists to plant a nuclear bomb in Baltimore the day of the Super Bowl. While the terrorists come from all different nations, the main threat is from Russia. Jack, well played by Ben Affleck knows this, he just has a hard time convincing anyone else, including the President, played to perfection by James Cromwell. Also of note here are performances by Morgan Freeman, Bridget Moynahan, and Ciaran Hinds as the Russian President. The direction, by Phil Alden Robinson, was simply incredible. There are two reasons that, as much as I would like to, I can't give this film a 10. First of all, there are times where the story becomes needlessly complicated. Second, Liev Schreiber, one of my favorite actors, was seriously underused. Other than these two complaints, I loved this film.

Pat C. gave it a 4:
Filler. Not the movie's fault if we expected greater things out of this one. As we continue to witness bigger and bigger Superbowl half-time shows, a nuclear device is eventually going to be involved anyway.

JJ gave it a 9:
I would like to respond to all of those who have criticized Ben Affleck for his portrayal of Clancy's Jack Ryan; Before you are so quick to discredit his performance, maybe you should take a minute RATIONALLY consider why Ben Affleck was chosen as the lead actor......Firstly, the movie is meant to take place at a point in time where Jack Ryan is just beginning his career. Yes he is supposed to be young, he is supposed to be inexperienced, and yes he is supposed to be in over his head. The whole point of the movie is that the character of Jack Ryan has been thrust into an overwhelming position with which he is not really familiar. He had never been on a special ops mission, he had never before associated with the CIA top brass. If this didn't come across as obvious when watching the movie, then it would seem that some critics must have been watching a different movie...Shakespeare in Love perhaps? The bottom line is that Affleck effectively portrays a young and inexperienced Jack Ryan. To those of you who believe that Schrieber should have been cast....well he is just as much a fossil as I am sure most of you are...and therefore completely wrong for the part of a YOUNG Jack Ryan. All that aside...the movie was excellent. The story was very well written, and the film had a very rythmic flow. To those who are asserting that the movie does not live up to our contemporary views on terror, I don't know what you've been smoking, but let's not forget that it IS BASED ON A TOM CLANCY NOVEL. The movie is fiction based on fiction, and the story should not and cannot be completely altered from its original incarnation. Therefore, the writers did an excellent job of creating a hybrid story, combining the modern, up-to-date feeling on terror, with the more political idea of terror that I am sure Tom Clancy had always intended to write about....considering the story has been around longer than any of Ford's Clancy incarnations, and Baldwin's.

Frank S. gave it a 2:
Not good. Not even close.

Jack D. gave it a 5:
Okay, but Affleck isn't right for the part and the tension is lacking.

Russian Speaker gave it a 6:
Moderately entertaining, but with some moments of unintentional hilarity. My favorite -- Ryan, who is supposedly fluent in Russian, can't understand two guards speaking Ukranian (which is closely related to Russian). Do any of these people do any research. Affleck is terrible as Jack Ryan -- Schreiber would have been much better.

Ray Z. gave it a 10:
WOW This is the Way Red Dawn Should have been made. Any Idiot who thinks otherwise is just that an Idiot. Keep in mind that it is just a movie all you Art'sy people try to make things to realistic. The Sum of all Fears falls in the catagory of Red Dawn and The Longest Day.

Sum of All Fears, The Paramount Pictures

Sum of All Fears, The
Paramount Pictures