Product Details

• Actors: Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Ken Jenkins, Liev Schreiber
• Format: Color, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: Spanish, English
• Subtitles: Spanish
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Paramount
• VHS Release Date: March 4, 2003
• Run Time: 123 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (326 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00006IUNS
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #565,211 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

It's not easy replacing Harrison Ford as a beloved screen hero, but Ben Affleck brings fresh vitality to The Sum of All Fears, reviving Paramount's Tom Clancy franchise in the role Ford made famous. As CIA agent Jack Ryan, Affleck is a rookie in the covert ranks, unraveling a plot that lures Russian and American superpowers into a nuclear standoff, while a neofascist faction turns most of Baltimore into an atomic wasteland and holds the world in the grip of a terrorist nightmare. Affleck combines sharp intelligence with a new-guy's perspective, while a senior agent (Morgan Freeman) passes the torch of back-channel authority. The result is one of the best Clancy films to date, ably helmed by Phil Alden Robinson (whose comic thriller Sneakers was sorely underrated) with a stellar supporting cast, and adapted with abundant humor, humanity, and thrills by Donnie Brasco screenwriter Paul Attanasio and cowriter Daniel Pyne. Even the typically reticent Clancy would approve. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker

It has a female chorus-it's that important a movie. This latest in a series of super-productions devoted to Tom Clancy's fictional C.I.A. agent Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) also features such familiar sights as mockups of the White House Situation Room, nuclear missiles rising on their launchers for takeoff, and an international cast of grimly serious actors speaking in foreign languages and dragging their subtitles from room to room. It's not the fault of the filmmakers (Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne wrote the script; Phil Alden Robinson directed) that actual events have overtaken the portentous clichés. But, as an evocation of danger, the movie is nowhere near serious or intelligent enough to satisfy our current sense of alarm. In a bold updating of Clancy's plot, the villains of the piece are turned into ... Nazis. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun and suspenseful, April 26, 2002

By 

Robert Jordan (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

I'm a hard-core Tom Clancy fan and was surprised to see how much this latest film adaptation wandered from the book, but it was still very entertaining. The latest incarnation of Jack Ryan is very young and inexperienced. The film seems to pretend the other Jack Ryan adventures haven't happened. Jack is new with the CIA and doesn't know the ropes the way he does in the book. He isn't even married yet. Morgan Freeman is wonderful as his boss (no surprise there) and the relationship between them is the best part of the film.

I'm no expert, but there seemed to be some technical flaws which required that the viewer suspend their skepticism. (Would cell phones continue to work when your local area has been hit by a nuke?) Still a worthy addition to the series. Clancy's readers will have to be especially open-minded though.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The fears of all post-9/11 filmmakers., November 26, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sum of All Fears (Special Collector's Edition) (DVD)

Deeply compromised adaptation of the Tom Clancy potboiler. Director Phil Alden Robinson and his cadre of screenwriters tippy-toe around, about, but never directly on, the subject of mass murder by terrorists. The immediate point of comparison to 9/11 in this film would be the small nuclear bomb that presumably obliterates the city of Baltimore, MD. I say "presumably" because we're of course not permitted to see the results of the devastation: Robinson & Co., by the use of very heavy editing, attempt to spare us from associating their fictional event to the real event that occurred a year ago. (Well, some windows are blown out, and a small, rather pretty computer-animated mushroom cloud is perceived for a split-second, indicating the city may not be completely wiped-out, after all.) Indeed, by film's end, it's as if the blast never occurred: in the last scene, Ben Affleck and his pretty wife are having lunch in the park. The End. One wonders why the film studio simply didn't scrap this whole project and eat the loss, if they were so fearful of the movie's subject-matter. Why go to the trouble of making a movie about a catastrophic event if you're not even going to play that event for dramatic value? Of course, the supreme irony is that the fearful filmmakers, who shot this movie before 9/11, changed the Muslim villains of Clancy's story to a cabal of Neo-Nazis, in order to avoid accusations of insensitivity from the Arab-American community. (If what I've heard is true. I've never read the book, myself. If the book doesn't feature Arab terrorists, I stand humbly corrected.) I give *The Sum of All Fears* a 2nd star primarily for the excellent supporting actors (Morgan Freeman, a delightfully smooth Liev Schreiber, James Cromwell, Philip Baker Hall, et al.), and for the overall professionalism of the direction . . . by which I mean that even if the story is implausible, the action sequences are not. However, Ben Affleck, filling the shoes of Harrison Ford as CIA agent Jack Ryan, is a massive liability. Not only is he a skunk at a garden party, in terms of comparison with the rest of the cast, but he makes one appreciate just how good his predecessor in the role really was.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's a *movie* folks..., June 19, 2002

By 

Thomas Ulrich (Powell, OH USA) - See all my reviews

I've read Clancy (but not this one) and I've seen all the "Clancy" movies many times. My wife drives me nuts by saying, "that wouldn't happen..." so I understand all you who try to analyze the plot for theoretical accuracy. But.... this is a work of entertainment based on fictional accounts of political conflict. Did it entertain? Absolutely. Did Affleck portray Jack Ryan the way Clancy wrote him? Of course. Are the plot points of the movie plausible? Well, maybe, but - that's the point of Clancy. In case you didn't notice, Tom Clancy was executive producer of this film so he certainly had considerable input. Yeah, they changed the chronology of Jack Ryan. Whooppee! That makes Debt of Honor and Executive Orders completely future potential for Ben Affleck as Ryan considering they can now do Cardinal of the Kremlin which they couldn't have done with Harrison Ford. Hmmmm, do we want to see more Clancy movies? Yes!