The Sum of All Fears
Paramount Pictures | Release Date: May 31, 2002 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
45
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews
Positive:
13
Mixed:
14
Negative:
8
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
38
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information. Read full review
30
Washington PostDesson Thomson
Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively. Read full review
30
New York Magazine (Vulture)Peter Rainer
Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now. Read full review
30
SalonCharles Taylor
Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors. Read full review
25
New York PostLou Lumenick
A moribund attempt to exhume the Jack Ryan techno-thriller franchise with a severely miscast Ben Affleck, is truly the 20-megaton bomb among this summer's blockbusters. Read full review
20
Rolling StonePeter Travers
How the hell did Ben Affleck, 29, wind up replacing Harrison Ford, 59, as our hero? Who's next as Ryan -- Ozzy Osbourne's guppy son, Jack? Chronology hasn't been this royally fucked with since Memento. Read full review
20
Village VoiceMichael Atkinson
The jerry-rigged result is a trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea. Read full review
20
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.
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