The Sum of All fears

Another Jack Ryan film but this time with Ben Afleck taking on the role of Jack Ryan in what would appear to be a supposed first ever Jack Ryan film. Either that or they must have been planing to completely reboot the series because anyone that has followed the films will know that Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan had a wife and daughter so this idea of Jack Ryan dating Cathy, who one would imagine is the same Cathy that he then marries can only be one of those two options.

No James Earl James so Morgan Freeman takes on that role. Morgan Freeman is a completely different CIA head to James Earl James and that has to be respected. You can't step in to those kind of shoes and try to play the character in the exact same way as the big name before you, you have to do something else with the character to make people try and forget about James Earl Jones. In some ways a better character, more personality and character to the Morgan Freeman change.

Ben Afleck... where to start? He is young, back when he and Paul Rudd looked like each other. Ben Afleck as he has got older has developed a face that shows and does nothing. I want more than anything to say that I was impressed with him, that I didn't notice who it was playing the character of Jack Ryan but I did. It's not that he was bad, this film was much better than Pearl Harbor but as far as convincing characters go this just wasn't it. Nothing particularly about Afleck as Ryan convinced me that he was actually a CIA analyst.

Ciaran Hines, a good choice for the Russian President. Not many people actually can pull off both the accent and the look but he is a solid investment for this type of thing. Nice to not have the blatantly obvious Scottish accent of Sean Connery letting you down. Russian is actually not an easy accent to keep up so full credit to him for keeping it going. I guess that I am probably a little disappointed that they have gone back to the Russians as their enemy. There are other people out there who could be enemies and as this film was not a remake of the hunt for Red October then they should have changed the enemy as well.

These films are based on the Tom Clancy books so they will probably just claim that they are using the plot and the enemies from the books but I don't believe that Tom Clancy would write two books with the same plot and that someone would actually be stupid enough to turn both books into films. I am hoping that Clear and Present Danger will be very different from this film and The Hunt For Red October but it may not feature on the blog this year.