We've all been there before. You're at a new job, but you're replacing somebody else, somebody everybody

else loved. A person no one could ever see leaving, and there you are, younger than that person, maybe you've got veneers.

Same doofy haircut though.

Where's the other guy?

Why aren't you him?

You're just a Ben Affleck, standing in front of a mushroom cloud asking a movie goer to love him as Jack Ryan.

And to the degree you're able to do that, I think you are able to love Phil Alden Robinson's Some of All Fears.

Back before the Jack Ryan Appendage was surgically affixed to every title in this catalogue.

You remember THE Phil Alden Robinson, who directed Field of Dreams and also sneakers which is a movie that Adam thinks is good

Anyway, this Jack Ryan is at the center of a very Jack Ryan problem.

He is the only one who knows the real truth about a terrorist incident.

And unless he's able to share that with the people who flip switches on nuclear suitcases it will be, as the great

Denzel Washington says in Crimson Tide, a nuclear holocaust.

And because this Jack Ryan is like all other Jack Ryan's. He will be in equal measure liked and laughed

at by all his co-workers and employers. He will have a patient and unbelievably trusting

lady friend, and he will have a black father figure.

Now I only say that because the physics and chemistry are very clear on the conservation

of black actors.

And when a character disappears from a Tom Clancy film, their energy is not destroyed, but instead transformed or transferred into another equally talented black actor.

In this case, James Earl Jones's beloved Admiral Greer is transmogrified into Morgan Freeman's director of the CIA,

William Cabot, who is wonderful in this film and proves the theory perfectly.

Anyways, why am I talking about this?

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