Affleck Becomes Clancy's Hero in New Movie

May 30, 2002 -- Is the world ready to be saved by Ben Affleck?

The Sum of All Fears, the fourth Tom Clancy novel adaptation, opens Friday, with Affleck as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, a role Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin previously played.

Clancy thrillers have made for a lot of popcorn munching theater fun. But this is a movie about a terrorist strike in Baltimore with a nuclear bomb. How will viewers now react in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack?

While some doubt the movie might have been made after Sept. 11 (it was shot months earlier), Affleck is proud of his work and has no regrets, hoping moviegoers will judge the film on its own terms.

'I Don't Have Any Ambivalence'

"I don't have any ambivalence," he told Diane Sawyer. "The movie is told tastefully. It's not sensationalism for the sake of titillation, showing disaster for 'oohs and aahs' from the audience."

Affleck talks more about the new movie, the tremendous challenge of perpetuating a character Baldwin and Ford created, and his own future on Primetime Thursday.

In the movie, a European neo-Nazi plants a nuclear bomb at a football stadium, hoping that the United States will blame Russia for the attack, sparking a nuclear war that will allow his fringe group to defeat East and West in one fell swoop.

Affleck plays a younger version of Jack Ryan. He's new at the CIA and has to convince the president to call off a U.S. counterattack. Images of Baltimore in flames and hospitals overrun with casualties may trouble some viewers, especially as the government warns of the possibility of future terrorist strikes.

But Affleck hopes moviegoers will judge this movie on its own terms and in context to Clancy's other work.

"There's another Tom Clancy book about somebody flying an airplane into the Capitol," he says, referring to Executive Orders, in which the president, Congress, and Supreme Court are obliterated when a Japanese terrorist crashes a 747 into the Capitol.

"I don't think anybody imagines that that was … the inspiration for this previous terrorist act. It's just a reflection of a really different world that we live in now, you know?" Too Fast, Too Soon?

Affleck, 29, burst into the upper echelons of stardom in 1997, when and his buddy from Cambridge, Mass., wrote and starred in the Oscar-winning blockbuster Good Will Hunting. That same year he was recognized for his role as a lovelorn comic book geek from New Jersey in Chasing Amy.

With many critics dubbing him Hollywood's newest bankable leading man, Affleck found it hard to live up to the potential, with several successive duds, including Bounce, Reindeer Games and Boiler Room.

Another project, Pearl Harbor, grossed close to $200 million domestically, but took a beating from the critics.

In the months after that film's release last year, Affleck checked himself into a rehab center to confront a drinking problem amid reports of a boozy binge at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Still a Daredevil

Once omnipresent on the gossip pages, partying with Damon and squiring ex-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow about lower Manhattan, Affleck now assumes a lower profile and says he's concentrating more on his craft.

He's not afraid to make fun of himself either. While many actors might sidestep the task of comparisons to popular leading men like Baldwin and Ford, Affleck said he had no qualms about taking on the role of Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan.

"I approached it as, not wanting to screw up this franchise, hoping that people would be kind to me," Affleck tells Sawyer with a laugh.

Affleck actually has the advantage of playing a younger version of Ryan. This movie takes place before the other Clancy novels that have come to the big screen.

"I got to play him differently," he says. "He's a little unsure of himself, sometimes trying too hard, sometimes making mistakes. I think people could believe that about me."

Affleck takes on a whole different hero in his next big project, bringing the comic legend Daredevil to the big screen. With the spectacular success of Spider-Man, the pressure may once again be building. But right now, like a good soldier, Affleck is at ease.