Ben Affleck was a blah Jack Ryan, but the supporting cast made the nuclear spy thriller memorable.
Every week,Entertainment Weeklyis looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002.
Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood’s strange new millennium.
Everett Collection
were basically my Xanax during the pandemic.
Give me an airport-paperback plot and a hard squint from Harrison Ford and I am all in.
Come at me,miscast Affleck!
Everett Collection
And wow, he does not disappoint.
His Jack Ryan does indeed come off like a lot less like a C.I.A.
turns out to be monumentally bad at communicating facts in an emergency?
Everett Collection
DARREN:One amazing quirk in this extremely un-quirky movie is that everyone is greatbesidesAffleck.
Jon Beasley!).
He’s not as savvy as the American or Russian politicians, who find themselves in a standoff.
I respect your love for this spy subgenre without quite sharing it.
Affleck’s oldGood Will Huntingpartner famously starred inanotherspy movie in summer 2002, which spoke to me much more.
(We’ll get there in a couple weeks.)
(The closing romantic picnic on the White House lawn is… a tad rushed.)
Have I delusionally rewrittenSum of All Fearsinto a Hinds-Cromwell two-hander?
I’m curious, where does this rank in the Leah Greenblatt Dad Espionage canon?
Live and let Liev!
I agree with you that the nuke scene feels both supremely icky and unearned.
I come to Dad Espionage for tidy solutions and the triumph of good, not unnecessary and ill-timed apocalypse.
Then, of course, I would not have been rewarded with that incongruous picnic.
To be fair, though, I haven’t read the source material.
Was Clancy’s novel, released in 1991, even more retrograde on these subjects than I know?
Hard to know what a summer-of-2002 audience would have made of that.
The phrase “too soon!”
comes to mind hell, the phrase “too soon!”
was practically invented around this time.
Instead,Sum’s main screen antagonist was rewritten as a Nazi billionaire.
“Come on, Nazi bad guys in 2002?
is what I remember thinking 20 years ago.
Sadly,Sum’s well-funded right-wing extremists look more realistic every day.
If it came out today it would feel like tomorrow.
The same can’t be said forSum, which depicts geopolitical frenzy with a clinical air.
Read past 2002 rewatches:
