Review – The Sum of All Fears

Jack Ryan seems to have taken a turn for the younger, completely out of step with his previous outings. If Tom Clancy really needed a more youthful hero, why didn’t he just cook up a fresh one? This odd and unnecessary inconsistency (along with a couple of others) aside, Clancy fans will no doubt get what they pay for with this thriller. There’s plenty of international intrigue, espionage high jinks, and effects-intensive action sequences. I suppose the destruction of Baltimore by a group of neo-nazis with a briefcase nuke would have seemed a good deal more ridiculous a year or so ago, but now of course it has a certain resonance. The tense escalation that occurs between the United States and Russia in the wake of the explosion (our president under the mistaken impression that Moscow is to blame for the attack) gets a little tiresome after awhile, and it’s resolved in a somewhat incredible manner. But otherwise this is an entertaining representative of its genre. Mildly amusing