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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"The Sum of All Fears" has a female chorus. It's that important a movie. The women's voices soar eloquently over views of Red Square, and everything else in the picture says, "Big movie about a big crisis." This is the latest in the series of super-productions devoted to Tom Clancy's fictional C.I.A. agent Jack Ryan, and it features such familiar sights as mockups of the White House Situation Room and the Kremlin reception halls; an editing scheme that hurls us back and forth across the globe; nuclear missiles rising for takeoff; and an international cast of grimly serious actors speaking in foreign languages and dragging their subtitles from room to room. I suppose we've all enjoyed this sort of thing at times--the intimate contact with national leaders and their harried advisers, the muttered asides and moments of flaring tempers, so reassuringly human and natural in men trying to prevent the end of life as we know it. "The Sum of All Fears" was put into production well before last September, so it's not the fault of the filmmakers (Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne wrote the script, and Phil Alden Robinson directed) that actual events have overtaken the portentous cliches. But it very well might be the filmmakers' fault that, as an evocation of danger, the movie seems threatening yet is nowhere...
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