"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…

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,…

The message from this film is simple, fascists=bad, fascists with nuclear weapons=worse. For a film made in 2002, eight years after Clear And Present Danger came out, Jack Ryan is looking distinctly sprightlier than he did in 1994. Ben Affleck dons the Bat-Cape, no, sorry, wrong film, Affleck takes on the role of Ryan in his fledgling outing which is really a prequel to both of Ford's films in the role. I'd always thought this was the poor relation in terms of the Ryan films to date, that was until Kenneth Branagh shit the bed with Shadow Recruit, but on reflection this isn't as bland as I'd remembered.

Ben Affleck had a tough act to follow as Jack Ryan. Baldwin…

Film#40 of 'It's June Jim, but not as we know it'

Even though Harrison Ford has infinitely more natural charisma than Ben Affleck, I still prefer this Jack Ryan outing over the other two.

It's not that difficult to pin point why that is, but I'll get to that later. I love this particular genre. The international espionage, the intelligence gathering, the slowly unfolding plot often riddled with conspiracies, when handled right these films are great. The Sum of all Fears gets just about everything right, with its only real flaw being that it chooses plot over character development.

What makes me instantly love this film is that it does something halfway that is completely against type, breaking most genre…

For its first half, The Sum Of All Fears decides to take a page out of Phillip Noyce’s two Jack Ryan films.

Not an action film, more of a spy / political drama than anything, and quite an engaging one. I don’t really think there’s much of a muchness going on here, in fact, it’s one of those films for a while that seems to get by off the back of a fairly interesting plot and a whole raft of fine performances.

Indeed, the only real obstacle it encounters is getting used to the fact that this is set before Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. It doesn’t prove to be much of one, with Ben Affleck and Bridget…

Ben Affleck kommt zwar nicht an Harrison Ford als Jack Ryan heran, macht seine Sache dennoch sehr gut und spielt absolut überzeugend. Genauso wie Ciarán Hinds als russischer Präsident nicht das Niveau von Sean Connery als russisches Kapitän erreicht, dennoch gewohnt großartig spielt.
Ebenso der Rest des Casts, allen voran Morgan Freeman und James Cromwell.

"Der Anschlag" hebt sich weder von den anderen Tom Clancy-Verfilmungen rund um CIA-Analytiker Jack Ryan ab, noch reicht er ganz an die Ford-Versionen oder auch "Jagd auf Roter Oktober" heran.
Und auch aus der Menge an ähnlichen Polit-Action-Katastrophen-Filmen, die vor und nach diesem Film erschienen, kann "Der Anschlag" nicht wirklich herausstechen und wird mir höchstwahrscheinlich nicht gerade detailliert in Erinnerung bleiben.

Doch die sehr interessante…

Sort of a son of two fathers, The Sum of All Fears has the potential to be a solid entry in the political thriller genre, but ends up feeling mangled as attempts to rework the narrative end up tangling it more. Plus, the timing of release, which was a mere nine months after 9/11 traumatized the nation, made the film's central idea of a nuclear terror attack seem... in bad taste.

Phil Alden Robinson, most known for the warmly Americana Field of Dreams, directs the film solidly, but you get the sense as if this film underwent serious reworking and reshoots. The sequences showing diplomatic chess between the US and a post-Soviet Russia, and the spycraft to discover what the villains…

“You're about to breathe air that's way over your pay grade so listen up. You're going to be asked for analysis and advice, so be God damn sure you know what you're talking about before you give it. Don't be afraid to say you don't know. Choose your words carefully, words have a habit of being turned into policy.” Cabot to Jack Ryan

I think that was the advice given to me when I produced my first job, though not said as nicely, lol.

 Much like the James Bond franchise, we have another Jack Ryan, this time played by Ben Affleck. When the film came out, I often wondered if this was a prequel but it is clearly a reboot…