‘Fears’ terminally dull, despite timely plot

In theaters

THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson. Written by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, based on the novel by Tom Clancy. 119 minutes. Rated PG-13.

With tensions rising to a boiling point between India and Pakistan, our own war being waged in the Middle East, suicide bombings the order of the day in Israel, and the very real threat that terrorists will once again strike our country, Phil Alden Robinson’s “The Sum of All Fears” couldn’t offer a more timely premise – a world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Too bad the movie itself is such a dull piece of nuclear waste.

The film, from a script Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne based on Tom Clancy’s best-selling 1991 novel, boils down Clancy’s 900-plus page opus to a consumer-friendly two-hour summer blockbuster, which, if you’ve ever read Clancy, is sort of like squeezing plutonium through a swatch of cheesecloth: One must do it delicately and with a measure of finesse or else the entire effort will blow up in your face.

As it does in Robinson’s.

In its most streamlined form, the director’s dense, often incoherent, film is about a group of neo-Nazi fascists who buy an American-made A-bomb on the black market and plant it within a cigarette machine they unload at a Baltimore stadium. When a Super Bowl fan decides he wants to light up, he buys a pack of cigarettes and unwittingly lights up Baltimore.

Before the blast, which comes more than an hour into the movie, the film is terminally dull; after the blast, it’s as absurd as the casting of Ben Affleck in the role of Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst previously played to perfection by Harrison Ford in “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger” and by Alec Baldwin in “The Hunt for Red October.”

Why Affleck as Ryan? With his blank face as expressive as a dime-store mannequin and his whiny voice as irritating as his pouty bottom lip, he has none of the charisma or gravitas of Ford or Baldwin, which is what the role demands – particularly since it asks Affleck to portray a man who must save our hinds from a situation that smacks of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Think about that for a moment. The film’s real horror doesn’t come from terrorists trading A-bombs or a potential nuclear war between the United States and Russia, but from the very frightening fact that someone in Hollywood thought Ben Affleck was a good choice to save the world. Further undermining the film is Robinson’s decision not to explain how Ryan has mysteriously changed from the middle-aged man of “Danger” to a young colt who looks as if he’d rather be knocking back beers at a frat party.

Ryan’s new youthful appearance doesn’t seem to be the work of Botox or an effective acid peal as much as it does the product of bad writing. Those familiar with the books know that “Fears” is a prequel to “Games” and “Danger,” thus accounting for Ryan’s sudden change in age, but since the movie takes place in the present, those familiar only with the movies can reasonably be expected to be confused.

With James Cromwell, Morgan Freeman, Alan Bates and Liev Schreiber rounding out a cast frequently asked to overact, “The Sum of All Fears” has nothing on real life, which exposes the film’s flaws and renders much of it a cartoon.

At one point in the movie, a character sneers into the camera and says, “Ahhh … the warmth of plutonium decay.” He’s talking about the guts of the bomb he’s building, but he very well could have been talking about this film.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, occasionally on E! Entertainment’s “E! News Weekend,” Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.