The Sum of All Fears [Blu-ray]

Overview

The successful franchise of Paramount motion pictures based on novelist Tom Clancy's techno-thrillers featuring heroic CIA intelligence analyst Jack Ryan stages a much-publicized "do-over" with this action-adventure that recasts the character of Ryan as a rookie to the complex game of geopolitical warfare. Ben Affleck takes the reins from Harrison Ford as Ryan, a greenhorn CIA historian and analyst who finds himself thrust front and center into the spy community's spotlight when Nemerov (Ciaran Hinds), a Russian politician on whom Ryan is an expert, suddenly becomes the leader of the former Soviet Union upon the current president's unexpected demise. Attached to the director of the CIA, Cabot (Morgan Freeman), Ryan insists -- contrary to the opinions of many high-ranking White House officials -- that Nemerov is not a warmonger. Meanwhile, a cadre of neo-fascists, led by Dressler (Alan Bates), plots the detonation at the Super Bowl in Baltimore, MD, of a nuclear device recovered from a long-ago Israeli fighter jet crash, a terrorist incident they intend to spark a war between the super powers, leaving them to conquer the world in the conflict's post-apocalyptic vacuum. The Sum of All Fears co-stars James Cromwell, Bridget Moynahan, and Liev Schreiber as covert operative John Clark, a character central to another series of Clancy's best-selling tomes.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/29/2008
UPC:	0097361376486
Original Release:	2002
Rating:	PG-13
Source:	Paramount
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby AC-3 Surround Sound]
Language:	English
Time:	2:03:00
Sales rank:	18,307

Special Features

COmmentary by director Alden Robinson and cinematographer John Lindley; Commentary by director Phil Alden Robinson and novelist Tom Clancy; The making of The Sum of All Fears; Creating Reality: The visual effects of the Sum of All Fears; Theatrical trailer HD

Editorial Reviews

A mostly successful effort to reboot Paramount's successful Tom Clancy franchise of high-tech political thrillers, this elaborate action hit is surprisingly gripping and effective for most of its running time, only fumbling with a poorly developed villain and a few regrettable clichés in its final act. Quickly becoming the American version of James Bond, the Jack Ryan character is here interpreted by the third actor in only four films, but it's a welcome surprise that Ben Affleck delivers his second good performance in the same year (after Changing Lanes). Affleck revealed a new vulnerability and emotional depth that will be welcomed by fans preferring Alec Baldwin's slightly nerdy take on Ryan over Harrison Ford's more seasoned tough-guy version. The script's conceit of returning Ryan to his young analysis-drone roots works quite well, emphasizing the character's fish-out-of-water qualities and making him a better stand-in for audience identification -- as well as giving the veteran Morgan Freeman something to play against as Ryan's wily fox of a professional mentor. A sequence involving a terrorist nuclear explosion on American soil is handled well effects-wise, and tastefully, out of consideration for real-world events only months before. However, the placement of the climactic blast at the film's midpoint, rather than later in the narrative where it belongs, serves to deflate the remaining tension. Scenes depicting the president's dickering with advisors over whether or not to launch a retaliatory strike smack of overly familiar Cold War vintage dramas such as By Dawn's Early Light, and it doesn't help that Ryan ends up grappling with a beefy neo-Nazi in a darkened Baltimore warehouse, a beat more reminiscent of a typical Barnaby Jones episode than an expensive summer blockbuster. Speaking of Nazis, Alan Bates as the film's proto-Hitler wannabe Dressler is never quite delineated clearly, showing up only occasionally to make demented fascist-apologist speeches and then disappearing for long stretches, his evil scheme never seeming realistic enough to create a palpable sense of dread. Nevertheless, the final payoff is satisfying and for most of the journey there, the filmmakers deliver the pulse-pounding goods, ensuring further Affleck-as-Ryan adventures will be in the offing.

Clancy evolves from storyteller to novelist in his latest techno-thriller, as gadgets take second place to politics and personalities. In the late 1990s the world is cautiously emerging from the Cold War; even the Arab-Israeli conflict is being resolved, thanks to the cleverness of Clancy's hero Jack Ryan. But as confrontation yields to cooperation, what becomes of displaced terrorists? Palestinians without a cause and East Germans without a country seek to rekindle U.S.-U.S.S.R. animosity. A small nuclear device is exploded at the Super Bowl; in Berlin American and Russian troops are tricked into firing on each other; residual suspicions carry the action from there. After the solution of the Middle East crisis serves as an exciting preliminary to the main plot, the novel's middle parts seem a recycling of situations and characters from Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin. But in the last third of the book Clancy integrates story lines, taking readers on a nonstop roller-coaster ride to a nail-biting finish. Fundamentally, Clancy is writing about a vital and elusive quality: grace under pressure. Whether terrorists or statesmen, Clancy's characters face a common challenge--situations that break down pretensions of rank, power and ideology. Their responses, carefully and empathetically constructed, make this book compelling instead of merely ingenious. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The master of the techno-thriller places nuclear-weapon technology in the hands of Third World terrorists and sets the superpowers on the path to Armageddon just when everybody thought it was safe to relax. Clancy dishes out page after page of highly detailed atomic bomb assembly directions and nuclear submarine specifications, enough technodazzle to satisfy the most seriously committed technofreak, but it is plain old-fashioned plotting in the best, hair-raising, we're-all-going-to-die-in-five-seconds-if-somebody- doesn't-do-something tradition that keeps things cracking in the very eventful life of Jack Ryan, hijacker of submarines, friend of princes, wizard of Wall Street, true spirit of the CIA, and devoted father. This time Ryan's nemeses are Arab terrorists who stumble on a lost Israeli atom bomb and get big ideas; the cowardly but attractive National Security Director who shares the President's pillow and hates our Jack; and the bottle. It is the last of these plagues that most worries Ryan's pretty ophthalmologist wife and friends. Stressed out by his responsibilities at Langley, unwinding every night with wine-in-a-box, he's gotten paunchy and cranky and unable to fulfill his husbandly role, and he's become vulnerable to the machinations of his archenemy Liz Elliot, the widowered President's favorite advisor. A boozy, discredited Jack Ryan means that the US is in deep danger when the Arabs hire an East German physicist to upgrade their beat-up but still lethal old bomb before placing it outside the Super Bowl game in Denver. With Ryan out of favor there's no one to counter Ms. Elliot's misinformed ravings. The pesky terrorists and their truculent Native American recruit intendthe atomic explosion to stir things up between the Americans and the supposedly defanged Soviets—and they get their wish. Ignoring Jack Ryan, listening to Liz Elliot, everybody in Washington panics, the Soviets get their backs up, bombers launch, submarines crank up their missiles, and thanks to more terrorist meddling, tanks from both sides start blowing each other up in Berlin. Has Jack knocked off the sauce in time to save the world? Clancy swears he has left the critical parts out of the atom bomb directions, and we will all just have to pray that he has. They sure seem complete, though. This is quite a rouser. (Book-of- the-Month Main Selection for August.)

Kirkus Reviews

A whiz-bang page-turner!”—The New York Times Book Review

“The Sum of All Fears delivers!”—People

“Explosive.”—Detroit Free Press

“A nonstop roller coaster ride to a nail-biting climax…ingenious.”—Publishers Weekly

“Tom Clancy at his best…This is a book not to be missed.”—Dallas Morning News

“Extraordinary suspense.”—Kansas City Star

“Clancy delivers with deadly accuracy and power…a spectacularly violent climax.”—Playboy

“Truly chilling…harrowing.”—Chicago Tribune

“Clancy knows how to build a thriller…stirring and vivid.”—Boston Globe

“Hair-raising…This is quite a rouser.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher