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June 7, 2002, 9:00 a.m. The Sum of All Hype Jack Ryan in wonderland. By Matt Feeney

he PR campaign for the The Sum of All Fears, an adaptation of a 1991 Tom Clancy novel, has deftly incorporated what is supposed to be worrisome about the movie. The story involves a devastating terrorist attack on an east-coast city, and so it has prompted somber comment on its post-9/11 appropriateness, with journalists asking questions that seem troubled and stars like Ben Affleck, who plays Clancy's CIA smarty Jack Ryan, offering up answers that seem thoughtful. You might think the upshot of all these concerns would be a sort of negative buzz, a hint of questionable taste, insensitivity. But the actual result has been to confer upon the movie an aura of gravitas that is completely undeserved. Groggily directed, lacking the most basic understanding of the political conflicts it purports to dramatize, The Sum of All Fears is less than a mere summer action movie. And yet, despite — or perhaps because of — the movie's ludicrous politics, reviews have been strangely respectful.

Early in the movie, Richard Dressler (Alan Bates), who's trying to provoke a nuclear crossfire between the U.S. and Russia, is shown to be an ambitious neofascist, indeed, a genuine Nazi. This, on its own, is evidence only that the filmmakers have bowed to the standard political daintiness of Hollywood, replacing the multiethnic congeries of terrorists from the novel with a single, uncontroversially European bad guy. But the organization that he is supposed to lead is the true giveaway that the people behind this adaptation are simply too ignorant to make a coherent political thriller. Dressler is promoting an international fascist movement, but, since fascist internationalism is a virtual oxymoron, the pan-European cabal of far-far-rightists he gathers in his library feels about as realistic as a convention of supervillains on Batman. I can't help suspecting that this cartoon villainy explains the film's strange appeal to critics, who have read the names Le Pen and Haider in newspapers and felt a rush of urgency — as if, all these years they've been exhorted to "smash fascism," and, now, finally, some real fascism!

Having replaced the minimally realistic terrorists from the novel with merely comforting ones, and having updated the whole mess by more than a decade, the filmmakers are forced into an extremely awkward bit of political fantasy. They simply conjure an alternate political universe, contemporaneous with our own and bearing many of the same details — a "President of the United States" who rides around in a bulletproof limo and lives in large white house in a city called "Washington, D.C." and who occasionally consults with olive-uniformed men who work in a five-sided building "across the river" — but requiring that we ignore everything that we know about contemporary geopolitics. In this alternate universe, Russia is not a struggling semi-democracy, but a nonsensical combination of its present-day self and Soviet Union circa 1985 — only more dissolute than the former and more opaque than the latter. The Russian armed forces are totally unmoored from political authority, and yet political authority in Moscow retains a Soviet-style centralization, with leadership changing hands via inscrutable succession struggles: When, after a leader's (president's? party secretary's?) death, the heir (Ciaran Hinds) becomes apparent, the Americans are left scratching their heads, asking, "Who's this new guy?" Only Jack Ryan has ever even heard of him. (Ryan, of course, has written a paper on him.)

Also in this alternate universe, the balance of power between the U.S. and the Russians is daffily conceived. The Russians act like they're still a superpower, contemptuous of American pressure, but the U.S. acts like a hyperpower, preparing to intervene in Chechnya after Russian atrocities. (Would the U.S. risk nuclear war by invading Russia, for humanitarian purposes? Do the filmmakers know that Chechnya is part of Russia?) And neither country exhibits the ingrained caution that characterized the real Cold War in its later stages. Indeed, these two countries seem to have only recently learned of each other's existence. There is no working regime of crisis management between the two countries. There is something called a "hotline," but nobody seems to have used it before. And so a completely implausible set of provocations escalates mechanically (though still, somehow, illogically) into a wobbly nuclear standoff.

A small nuclear weapon is towed into port at Baltimore and detonated, and all the Americans except Jack Ryan are just sure that the Russians have done it. Nobody stops to ask just what the Russians have to gain from blowing up central Baltimore, terrorist-style, and then disclaiming responsibility. From that point, the movie occupies itself with the policy-analyst heroics of Jack Ryan, who runs around gathering information to disprove a thesis that nobody in his right mind would believe in the first place.

This points to another problem in the movie. There is a choking sanctimony in its portrayal of the relationship between political and military men in both Washington and Moscow. With a couple of exceptions, defense and military types are shown to have all the self-control of the Bloods and the Crips — they're just itching to bust a nuclear-tipped cap into each other's asses. (This is a comfy truism of filmmakers and songwriters — the trigger-happiness of generals — but as presidents from Lincoln to Bushes I and II have learned, the real problem with generals is often the opposite.) But the people with a truly underdeveloped sense of the human meaning of nuclear war are the filmmakers themselves. Downtown Baltimore is vaporized and director Phil Alden Robinson and screenwriters Paul Attansio and Daniel Pyne, treat it as no more than a plot point. There is not a single moment in which the audience is allowed to dwell in the brute enormity of the fact that, good God, somebody just nuked Baltimore! Instead, it's right back to frantic Jack Ryan commandeering pickup trucks and helicopters and computer terminals in an all-out effort, one, to keep a bunch of mentally defective generals from blowing up the world, and, two, to find his girlfriend.

All this illogic would be not just excusable but commendable if it were in the service of a diverting piece of entertainment — one of those overwrought, frankly nonsensical summer confections like John Woo's Mission Impossible 2. But Robinson utterly lacks Woo's visual exuberance. He strains for lyricism, but it tends to involve holding a static camera on something like smoke trails or water, and for just long enough to induce sleepiness. And he also lacks something else that is key in a Jack Ryan movie — the ability to create drama, indeed action, out of simply trying to make oneself understood, which in turn requires a political universe that is coherent enough to actually bear talking about. Sure, Ben Affleck shouts into cell phones a good deal, but this is only irritating — in part because he's shouting, in part because his cell phone keeps cutting out, and in part because he's talking about something that doesn't make any sense (and in part because he's Ben Affleck). There is nothing like the elegant language game on which The Hunt for Red October was built. There's just a random lurching from crisis to crisis that nobody — the characters, the writers, the director — seems to understand.

— Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.