THE SUM OF ALL FEARS
"This is the latest in the series of super-productions devoted to
Tom Clancy's fictional C.I.A. agent Jack Ryan, and it features such
familiar sights as mockups of the White House Situation Room and the
Kremlin reception halls; an editing scheme that hurls us back and
forth across the globe; nuclear missiles rising for takeoff; and an
international cast of grimly serious actors speaking in foreign languages
and dragging their subtitles from room to room...I'm afraid it's no
longer possible to enjoy world-crisis thrillers like 'The Sum of All
Fears' as amusingly alarmist entertainment. Watching the brilliant
intelligence agents doing their stuff, the audience may reflect that
some of the actual men charged with protecting us from danger have
not yet learned that two plus two might equal four."-David Denby,
The New Yorker
"At the packed Loews Astor Plaza where I saw 'The Sum of All Fears'
last week, the blast sequence was followed by a silence I don't remember
ever experiencing at an action film. The usual buzz that follows a
sudden jolt in a movie was absolutely, eerily missing... It was as
if we were all crowded around a TV set on the morning of 9/11, repulsed
by what we were seeing but unable to look away... with the escalating
warnings about potential terrorism, with tunnels and bridges being
shut down as precautions against presumably authentic threats, with
the Middle East about to blow, with India and Pakistan threatening
to lob nukes at each other any day, with the last girder being hauled
from Ground Zero this week, and with documentary replays of 9/11 airing
on TV ... well, watching Baltimore get blown up on a cool Super Bowl
Sunday may not be the entertainment we all crave." --Jack Mathews,
The New York Daily News
"... a blistering thriller about terrorism in which a nuclear device
blows up the city of Baltimore...The movie may seem absurd, but maybe
Tom Clancy knows something about why we deserve to have our nerves
fried. Just when you're convinced a nuclear bomb could never arrive
undetected in a port like Baltimore, technical advisors in Washington
assure us that six million crates arrive on U.S. docks by cargo ship
each year, and that only 2 percent of the containers are ever inspected.
Holy hydrogen, it's always something." -Rex Reed, The New York Observer
"It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now
that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least
for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of
sentimental mush... Its far-fetched scenario, updated to the present
by the director Phil Alden Robinson and the screenwriters Paul Attanasio
and Daniel Pyne, seems at once old hat, insufficient and foolish."-Stephen
Holden, The New York Times
"One understands why the C.I.A. lent its assistance to the film: The
running joke about the agency knowing everything about everybody is
invaluable P.R. at a time when people are asking embarrassing questions
about who knew what before 9/11...When the carnage is over, 9/11 looks
like a tea party. Frankly, I was impressed by how many tit-for-tat
retaliatory responses the filmmakers allow before pulling the plug
on the conspirators and averting an American-Russian Armageddon. You
have to see it to believe it."--Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer
"'The Sum of All Fears' could hardly be more timely or frightening
in its depiction of the world's vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction
in the hands of terrorists. This crackling, if overly complicated,
version of the Tom Clancy action-political thriller imagines what
could happen if a nuclear warhead threatened an American city--a scenario
that seems less like fiction every day...'The Sum of All Fears' has
vast scope, unflagging energy, a rousing Jerry Goldsmith score and
a horrendous disaster sequence that conveys much in discreet fashion
in keeping with post-Sept. 11 sensibilities yet is needlessly evasive
in telling us the precise extent of its magnitude... a little clarity
would have gone a long way." -Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
|
|
