“The Sum Of All Fears”, filmed in June 2001, was possibly the last of the pre-9/11 political thrillers, set in that twilight period when Communism was no longer the enemy but before the attack on New York and Washington DC. Based on the novel by Tom Clancy, it tells the story of a missing Israeli nuclear bomb and its use in a plot by a Neo-Nazi Austrian billionaire to escalate a major international crisis.
Starring Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman, the real stars of the movie are actually the galaxy of character actors in all the secondary roles, from (the very under-rated) Liev Schreiber to James Cromwell to Ciaran Hinds to a dozen others you’ll recognise from pretty much every US TV show made in the last ten years.
It’s a good yarn, with plenty of big set-piece action scenes whilst also showing how the hopes of the post-Cold War Clinto era, where Russia was on the verge of becoming a real democracy veered on into such a different direction.