Fears keeps audience on edge

The Sum of All Fears makes an impression on its audience, not to mention the city of Baltimore, Md. The movie is based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name. Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) is a CIA agent who suddenly becomes an assistant of sorts to Bill Cabot (Morgan Freeman), a high level CIA official and close friend to President Fowler (James Cromwell). Jack becomes involved in a nuclear arms inspection because of his knowledge of the Russian president. He goes from a desk job in CIA headquarters to field inspections in, of all places, Russia. This is quite a jump for a man who seems to only be a child compared to the counterparts he encounters in his journey from Langley to Russia. The plot continues as Jack becomes primarily the only person in America that knows exactly what is happening in Russia. Three scientists, who together would be the perfect team to build a secret bomb, are found to be missing in Jack and Bill's tour of the Russian facilities. This alarms Ryan, and he is sent with a secret agent of sorts to investigate. Halfway through the movie, the secret bomb that Jack finds in his investigation ends up at a stadium in Baltimore and detonates. Amid all the chaos in Baltimore that seems unusually calm, the president and his advisers aboard Air Force One are deciding how to handle the situation. Jack ends up being the only person with the knowledge of how to handle the situation. He knows how to keep the United States and Russia out of a nuclear war. This is peculiar because we assume the president and his many advisers would know what to do. Affleck's portrayal of Jack Ryan is good enough, but it seems that he is trying too hard and not making it work. He is too young of a person to be playing the character of who we are to assume is one of the brightest CIA agents to date, not to mention Clancy's hero. This is not to say the movie is not worth seeing. The combination of characters and plot makes it a must see, as long as one is not bothered by mass destruction and sub-par acting by Affleck. Rating: B