This appears to be “Company” summer, where the term “Company” — in case there is anyone there who doesn’t already know this — is “spook” jargon for the Central Intelligence Agency. We have had Bad Company, The Sum of All Fears and The Bourne Identity, based around the C.I.A.

The Sum of All Fears is taken from the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, but — presumably to make the replacement of elderly-looking Harrison Ford by young-looking Ben Affleck in the role of Jack Ryan palatable — pulls the novel out of the arc of Clancy novels (in which, if I remember correctly — I’m not one of the world’s great Clancy fans — Jack Ryan is now President of the United States) and does a “reset” on Ryan, turning him into a brand-new, wet-behind-the-ears analyst for the C.I.A., something he definitely wasn’t in the book. Wife and daughter have, of course, disappeared; Ryan is dating Cathy again.

In Russia, a new president has taken over the country, and Ryan, it turns out, is the only person who knows anything about him — and few of his colleagues, with the exception of C.I.A. director William Cabot (the inimitable Morgan Freeman), is willing to trust that what he knows is right. Meanwhile, several Russian nuclear physicists have gone missing, and a couple of middle-eastern junk dealers are dying of radiation poisoning. About halfway through the film, Baltimore suddenly goes f-f-f-t in a Hiroshima-comparable fireball, and everybody just knows that the Russians are responsible. Tension escalates, and World War III is about to break out until Ryan convinces everybody to back off. Ultimately, the real culprits (“jawohl, Herr Kapitän!”) are uncovered and punished.

I still haven’t decided whether or not this film is better or worse than the book. On the one hand, we are free of the ten percent of the text that described how to connect wire A to pole B to ensure that the bomb would go off when you turned vernier C exactly 2.57 turns counterclockwise. This is a big step forward, IMHO. On the other hand, as mentioned above this Jack Ryan just isn’t the Jack Ryan of Patriot Games and A Clear and Present Danger, and there’s no way he’s going to be the Jack Ryan of Debt of Honor and Executive Orders. Well, I guess you take the bad with the good. That the terrorist atomic explosion occurs about halfway through the film rather than near the end (as it was in the book) is, given the plot modifications, to be expected. (A by-the-bye: Liev Schreiber strikes me as being as good a John Clark as William Dafoe did …)

All in all, I rather enjoyed it.