A light doomsday snack, unsatisfying even for the duration. One wonders whether, out of post-9/11 sensitivity, or trepidation, or something, the images of a nuclear blast in Baltimore (at a football stadium where "Chicago" is for some reason lined up against "Florida"), not to mention its immediate aftermath, haven't been scaled back and toned down a bit: an invisible tsunami crashing through the windows of a hospital, overturning cars, knocking a helicopter for a loop, etc. After which the color is drained from the screen, and the predominant tone becomes frigid blue, a visual synonym, perhaps, for sad, morose, mournful. The filmmakers (director Phil Alden Robinson and co-writers Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne) cannot bring themselves to muster up even a rough estimate of the casualties: the fear of all sums. Our general impression is that they are somehow unprepared to face up to their own chosen subject. Any contemporary "relevance" is in any event fribbled away in a plot ripped not so much from today's headlines as from adolescent daydreams: a neo-Nazi conspiracy to push the U.S. and Russia over the nuclear brink, and one man only who can pull them back, a clean-cut desk-bound CIA yuppie who is thrust center-stage on the strength of a report he once authored on the new Russian president. That man is "Jack Ryan," hero of a series of Tom Clancy novels, though the casting of Ben Affleck effectively severs all ties with the hero's prior incarnations in the form of Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford (old enough to be Affleck's father). This isn't just Pierce Brosnan slipping into the Brooks Brothers suits of Sean Connery and Roger Moore, with the twanging "James Bond Theme" providing continuity. This is as separate as Casino Royale. Affleck gets strong support, however, from the likes of Morgan Freeman, Liev Schreiber, Ciarán Hinds, James Cromwell, Ron Rifkin, Bruce McGill, and Philip Baker Hall; so strong, in truth, that it stresses the weakness of both protagonist and plot. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd