Alarming, foreboding, perplexing... just why was Ben Affleck cast as the new Jack Ryan? At 30 years younger than previous Ryan incarnation Harrison Ford, Affleck's involvement in The Sum Of All Fears does nothing for an already inconsistent series that has seen four outings and three different leading men.
The solution? A script that sets the action in the present day while paradoxically placing Ryan at the beginning of his CIA career, and thus rather arrogantly disregards the previous three movies. Simple, yet not necessarily effective.
To be fair, Affleck is adequate enough, displaying the right mix of uncertainty and frustration as he searches for the source of a terrorist attack on Baltimore while nuclear war looms. However, despite the complexity of the crisis and the techno-thriller dialogue, the plot is under-written and overly hasty.