The Sum of All Fears (2002)iMDB Rating: 6.3
Date Released : 15 August 2002
Genre : Action, Drama, Thriller
Stars : Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, Ian Mongrain, Russell Bobbitt
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 700 MB
Download Trailer Subtitle
When the president of Russia suddenly dies, a man whose politics are virtually unknown succeeds him. The change in political leaders sparks paranoia among American CIA officials, so CIA director Bill Cabot recruits a young analyst to supply insight and advice on the situation. Then the unthinkable happens: a nuclear bomb explodes in a U.S. city, and America is quick to blame the Russians.
Watch The Sum of All Fears Trailer :
Review :
Memo to Hollywood: The Cold War Is Over
"The Sum of All Fears" is the fourth film in the Jack Ryan franchise, but no attempt is made to maintain continuity with the earlier three episodes. No longer is Ryan the middle-aged family man portrayed by Harrison Ford in "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger"; Ben Affleck's character is far younger than Ford's, younger even than Alec Baldwin's in "The Hunt for Red October", even though that film was set in 1984 and "The Sum of All Fears" in 2002 or 2003. Whereas Ford's character was married, Affleck's is a bachelor, although he has a girlfriend with the same name, Cathy, as Ryan's wife in the earlier films.
At a time of rising international tension between America and Russia, the city of Baltimore is destroyed by a nuclear device. The real culprits are neo-Nazi terrorists, but everyone in America assumes that the Russians are responsible, an assumption which is strengthened when a rogue Russian general orders an air attack on a US aircraft carrier. Ryan, a CIA analyst, is one of the few people in America who realises that the bomb which destroyed Baltimore did not come from Russia, and has to try to persuade the trigger-happy American President, J. Robert Fowler, before he can order a revenge attack.
This was one of the few films from the early 2000s which did not earn Ben Affleck a Razzie nomination. He has never been my favourite actor, but at least he is better in "The Sum of All Fears" than in many of his films- certainly a lot better than in, say, "Pearl Harbor" from the previous year. Even so, he never quite brings the authority to the part that Baldwin and Ford did in the three previous Ryan films. The best acting performance comes from the normally reliable Morgan Freeman as Ryan's boss, CIA Director William Cabot.
The script makes a few changes from Tom Clancy's novel, but these were largely made for the sake of political correctness rather than plausibility. Clancy's terrorists were Arab nationalists; here they are neo-Nazis who make convenient villains because virtually everyone hates them and they won't alienate any ethnic groups among the target audience. Director Phil Alden Robinson declared that he did not wish to promote negative images of Muslims or Arabs, but he seemed less concerned about promoting negative images of Russians. Early in the film were hear that the Russian Army has launched a massive chemical warfare attack on Chechnya; although it transpires that this was carried out by maverick commanders without the approval of their Government, the Russian President nevertheless decides to take the "credit" for it on the grounds that it is better to be seen as a mass-murderer than as an incompetent weakling.
It is a general rule in the cinema that political thrillers, if they are to remain thrilling, should be set in the present or the near future. There is a partial exception for films based on real events, like "K-19 the Widowmaker" or "Thirteen Days" about the Cuban missile crisis, but this does not apply to purely fictional stories. There would have been little point in making "The Sum of All Fears" as a Cold War period piece set in the sixties or seventies as everyone knows that nuclear war never broke out between the superpowers during that era.
Unfortunately, I was never sure what the point was of making the film at all. As a thriller, the film is fairly exciting, but its main problem is that it is stuck in the past and reflects American/Russian relationships as they were in 1962 or 1982, not as they were in 2002. The second half of the film concentrates too much on political intrigue and not enough on what is happening in the devastated city- we never even learn how many people have died. The plot-line seems more suited to the Cold War era than it does to the early twenty-first century, and indeed was looking a bit rusty even when Clancy published his novel in 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Given that the 9/11 attacks took place shortly after filming was completed, and several months before the film opened in May 2002, Robinson might indeed have looked more prescient had he made a film about Middle Eastern terrorism rather than trying to rehash something like "Fail-Safe" for the modern age. 6/10
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar