Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Will Menaker ★★★ 6

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Very satisfying dumb guy movie where neo-fascists use an Israeli nuke flatten to Baltimore, killing all your favorite characters from "The Wire." McNutty, Herc, Carver, Bunk, Omar, Bubbles, Prop Joe, they're all dead now.

  This is probably the most purely "Tom Clancy" of all the film adaptations of his work. Despite swapping out the Arab terrorists of the book with a cabal of fascist academics, this still lets him indulge his primary fetish: portraying Russia as a country of dim, back-stabbing clowns and getting off imagining the US *almost* engaging in a nuclear exchange with them.

  There's also a funny part towards the end where Jack Ryan is begging someone at the Pentagon to let him do his job as a CIA analyst, which he describes "getting the right information to the people in power" who would make the right choice if only they knew what he does. This movie came out in 2002 lol.

• 

  Review by Matt! ★★★ 4

  More of a holdover from the 90s than it is a product of the 00s, The Sum of All Fears is a movie created with a Tom Clancy-shaped cookie cutter in which CIA analyst Jack Ryan yet again saves the US from all-out war with Russia, giving all the desk-flying number crunchers out there giant hard ons for the umpteenth time. Other than pretty boy Affleck being a pretty forgettable Ryan, this one is probably best known for absolutely obliterating Baltimore off the face of the planet (let’s see, 2002…there’s a Ray Lewis joke in there somewhere), easily the most nuts catastrophe in the whole series. 

  Slightly better than people give it credit for, but still relatively average as far as action movies go.

  1990s: Action and Awesomeness (90s movie in spirit!)

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★★½

  kind of alone as both a studio franchise thriller and a post-9/11 disaster movie (this was released only 9 months later) in that it forgoes conventional action movie car-chase/gunfight theatrics in favor of a lot of phone calls, with all parties involved trying to operate with the most reliable data they can obtain. cooler heads prevailing didn't stay fashionable as American heroism for very long but that doesn't prevent this from remaining weirdly timely today.

• 

  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★ 7

  Cinematic Time Capsule
  2002 Marathon - Film #86

  
  The sum of all fears divided by the square root of Affleck equals 💤

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 2002 Ranked

  Long Live Physical Media

• 

  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★ 5

  "When I asked for your advice, I didn't mean that you should actually speak."

  The Sum of All Fears is an action movie without any fight scenes. The reason Jack Ryan has so much potential which is so difficult to realize on film is that he gives us an action hero with a desk job. Beyond the simple immediate intrigue of a such a contradictory premise, this has the significant benefit of forcing a genre which too easily gets caught up in its own destruction to focus on dialogue and drama. The problem is that these movies lack the inspiration and guidance to really break free from the trappings of every other action movie.

  Honestly, this movie was so bland…

• 

  Review by 🎃 Ben Hibburd 🎃 ★★★ 5

  "The Sum of All Fears" is the personification of studio mediocrity. I shaved two hours off my life as my eyes glazed listlessly whilst my brain dropped into second gear. Ben Affleck running around trying to stop WWIII or whatever, it was fine. It had none of the panache from Harrison Ford's run as Jack Ryan. I liked parts of this film but it definitely needed more Liev Schreiber who dominated every scene he was in. It's just a shame he was used so sparingly. Either way this was a modest thriller with a couple of neat moments. I guess you could make some joke about it being less than the sum of it parts or whatever.

• 

  Review by Sally Jane Black 25

  I just can't fathom being in the position where you have to choose between nuclear war and not nuclear war and even ever thinking "nuclear war." If you are sitting on the biggest, most destructive arsenal in the history of the world, and you've been attacked, and your reaction is to angrily demand to start the end of the world, I just cannot sympathize with you. That isn't being strong. That isn't being clever. That isn't being compassionate. That isn't being defensive, even. That's probably not even nihilism; it's worse. It's a level of arrogance and disdain for life that is utterly foreign to me.

  As this film shows a bunch of serious, shaky-cammed white men harrumphing about nuclear holocaust,…

• 

  Review by David Chen ★★½ 4

  Looking forward to the sequel, The Product of All Fears

• 

  Review by Brian Tallerico ★★½

  The first half is pretty good but the second is pretty bad and Affleck sucks in both.

  They should have just let Schreiber play Ryan.

• 

  Review by Andreas Bardét ★★★★½ 1

  Handwerklich ein perfekt gemachter Film.
  UND ICH MAG IHN.

• 

  Review by Mark Marshall ★★½

  I’d say the sum of all fears is about 2.5

• 

  Review by Middle-Aged Hate Eternal Enthusiast ★★★★ 19

  If they made a film about Affleck’s last decade, it could be reasonably be called The Sum of All Beers.

  Anyway….am I crazy or is this actually really damn good? I was expecting something ranging from middling to train wreck. What I got instead is a well above average thriller, incredibly well shot with terrifically strong performances across the board. It also sports a spine chillingly prescient narrative, surrounding a plot by fascists to set Russia and America against one another. The primary antagonist of the film, Dressler, is eerily similar to the sort of authoritarian politician that we’ve seen become disturbingly ascendant all around the globe the last decade or so. 

  The nightmarish escalation of increasingly violent military engagement…