The Sum of All Fears (2002)

This movie sits somewhere between "not-bad" and "pretty good." I never saw this when it came out, probably because (and just guessing here) it struck me at the time as another throw-away action film based on a Tom Clancy novel. Well...I was right. You can live your entire life and never see this movie, and you will not have missed anything.

That said, it's by no means a bad film. It's just a little too "of it's time" and seems like a carbon copy of a dozen similar films. I give it points for the cast, which  includes a rogues gallery of random movie bad guys you know you've seen before but can't remember where, also for the the intricate and all-too-believable plot, and for upping the stakes right when they needed to be upped. 

Obviously this came at a really, really touchy time for national security and geo-politics and it's almost like..."You're seriously going to go there, less than a year after 9/11?" Well, yeah...they went there. And maybe that's why it did so well at the box office. The only thing is the plot of the film (book, whatever), as believable as it is, is actually kind of less bizarre and scary than what happened to us in real life. It was a strange time to be making thrillers. 

If this film has any "charm" it's as an artifact of the early 2000s. You've got a young Ben Affleck, a young-er Morgan Freeman, Bridget Moynahan, flip-phones, and a lot of baggy, late-90s / early-2000s clothes. The arrival of the millennium (and certainly 9/11) fooled us into thinking of that period as somehow distinct from "the 90s." However, watching this movie now, in 2022, it's so clearly all the same era with the same conventions of filmmaking, the same styles, and the same expectations of a thriller: which is that the bad guys threaten to blow up the world and the good guy saves the day. Has it changed? Perhaps not.