'The Sum of All Fears'
Affleck-ted

WHILE IT'S ASSUMED that multifilm franchises need to sustain a certain sense of consistency, some action series often need to bend the rules a bit as the years progress: look at James Bond, who's gone through five (and possibly counting) actors in order to keep the secret agent magically suspended in his late 30s. So when Tom Clancy's intellectual man of mystery, Jack Ryan – a character who's already changed hands once, from Alec Baldwin to franchise savior Harrison Ford – gets another face-lift, one assumes a few minor tweaks lurk behind the curtain. But to suddenly transform a married, fortysomething husband and father into a single, twentysomething young turk played by Ben Affleck, as the Phil Alden Robinson-directed The Sum of All Fears does, with nary an explanation – it crosses the realm of über-geek chat-room arguments into the land of fatal distractions. The suddenly youthful Central Intelligence Agency analyst must confront a grab bag of stock action-espionage villains (cold war-era Russians, hawkish American generals, terrorist organizations, neo-Nazis – whither the kitchen sink?!) and figure out who plans to wreak havoc with a rogue nuclear bomb before the unthinkable happens. What's basically a run-of-the-mill nail-biter is helped by a good supporting cast, notably Liev Schreiber and the voice of cinematic gravitas, Morgan Freeman, and a third-act set piece designed to drop jaws. But the flaw of having the Ryan brand-name cake and eating it at the 18-to-24 demographic table too is just too big to overlook. With his square-jaw good looks and undeniable screen presence, Affleck could one day mature into a top-notch action hero. Trying to pitch him now as the next edition of the thinking man's Bond, however, just works to undo the sum of the established series's parts. (David Fear)