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The Bourne Ultimatum
Here’s where I avoid making a pun on ‘Bourne Again’
2007
Review: August 7, 2007
Director: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Julia Stiles
Probably an enhancement.
THE SETUP:
Once more through the Bourne routine.
DISCUSSION:
The reviews I’m reading make this movie out to be among the best things that happened this year [which, the way things are going, it very well could be], and the single-handed savior of the action genre. It’s a very good action movie, but it’s essentially the exact same movie as the last one, only wrapped up at the end this time.
Bourne is chillin’ when he reads an article about himself in the paper. He wants to find the reporter and then find his source in order to get answers as to who he is. He does find the reporter, but so does the CIA, led by David Strathairn as Vosen, who is the kind of character these movies must have: one who believes that Bourne is a threat and is confident he can bring him down. There’s a bit of present-day frisson in that they find the reporter by tapping his private conversation, a buzzword he uses marking his call as suspicious.
This leads to a bang-up sequence in Waterloo station, with Bourne trying to guide the reporter through the agents and assassins swarming the station after him. Bourne escapes, but now the CIA has a sighting and are after him whole-hog.
SPOILERS > > >
Meanwhile Joan Allen, as Pamela Landy, Bourne’s nemesis from the second movie, is pitted against Vosen within the CIA, her knowing Bourne’s ways and believing he’s noble, Vosen having a personal stake in finding and killing him. And if everything goes wrong, Vosen has a plan to blame Landy for it.
< < < SPOILERS END
So it all goes on. There are several things the movie does right. For one, each of the action setpieces are different. There’s the Waterloo suspense sequence, a chase over Tangier rooftops and through apartments, a bang-up knock-down fistfight [with no music, just the sounds of punches and bangs], and a shockingly brutal car chase through Manhattan. Throughout little personal touches—like the reason Julia Stiles has been on hand all along—are revealed, and these make the movie, which is essentially one long chase, not seem so much like one long chase.
This series does seem like the fully modern action movie of the 21st century, in that it delivers all the thrills you want, but free of the bombast and one-liners that people got so tired of in the bloated action thrillers of the 90s. You know, the whole Schwarzenegger thing. This series has always quite smartly worked in contrast to all that; Bourne is quiet and unassuming rather than macho and swaggering, the action is close, realistic and comes in quick bursts rather than massive over-the-top setpieces, and as a whole the enterprise generates excitement by giving the appearance of gritty realism, rather than mass-scale preposterous mayhem. This is where director Greengrass’ “documentary style” [i.e. lots of handheld] works so perfectly to keep viewer’s both close to he action and overwhelmed by the constantly circling threats. One can also see the influence of this series in recent action films, most notably in the new James Bond of Casino Royale, who now gets hurt and has dialed down the gadgetry, and also Live Free or Die Hard, which had to become a self-conscious parody of itself in order to pass muster.
Other critics have been talking a lot about what they see as Bourne’s wearying of violence, but I didn’t really see it. He has always been a somewhat responsible fellow, not killing when he doesn’t have to, and I don’t see much change in that here, except at the end he starts to talk about it a tiny bit. The last image smartly recalls the first image of the first film, making giving a nice shape to the entire series.
So that’s about the deal. It’s very good, maybe the best of the series, but they’ve all been good, and this is just another, you know, good one.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you liked the others of just like good action.
