Art imitates life. (Now Playing).(The Sum of All Fears)

Tom Clancy's geopolitical page-turners have always been the stuff of fantasy, but the actual geopolitics of today make The Sum of All Fears--the fourth big-screen adaptation of a Clancy novel--look particularly out of this world. It's a what-if thriller upstaged by what really is.

Clancy's plots feed off political paranoia--superpower standoffs, terrorist threats, and doomsday scenarios. When most of his books were published, they managed to keep pace with (or even one step ahead of) headlines on those very topics. At first glance, Clancy seems to be nicely topical again here. The Sum of All Fears depicts a shadowy terrorist group at work. But this gang goads the United States and Russia into a war against each other, giving our age of terror attacks an extra Cold War chill. The way this juicy scenario plays out, however, makes the film feel curiously dated, even quaint.

This isn't due to laziness on the filmmakers' part, for the powers that be at Paramount Pictures have done everything possible to update Clancy's 1991 novel to 2002. The most drastic change is that Harrison Ford, who played Clancy hero Jack Ryan in Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games, was dropped from the franchise. In came twenty-something Ben Affleck and the need to rework the story for a lead character two decades younger than in the novel.

But the emphasis on one heroic figure undermines the relevance and believability of The Sum of All Fears. The anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan isn't the doing of one clever CIA agent, but of thousands of fighters down the line. In The Sum of All Fears, all we need is ...