‘The Sum of All Fears’ (2002)

The Villain: The Russians, maybe. But really, neo-Nazis.

Who is Jack Ryan? Ben Affleck enters the fold as the youngest Ryan yet. This film had the most audacious plot of all of them: A nuclear bomb is detonated inside Baltimore, and everyone thinks it’s the work of the new Russian leader, President Nemerov (Mance Rayder, er, Ciaran Hinds). But not Ryan, who has studied Nemerov at length, and knows deep down he’s not a hardliner.

This film features an unusually ineffective Ryan, who, again, can’t stop a nuclear bomb from detonating inside Baltimore. But after it goes off, he is able to get cooler heads to prevail and exonerate Russia just as the two countries are on the brink of nuclear war. The real culprits turned out to be neoNazis, who want to start a war for some reason — it’s never totally clear.