Victoria,
Well, as we’ve discussed, franchise fatigue is a thing, and I’ve got it bad for the Bourne series. Not that The Bourne Ultimatum is a bad film at all - I think it’s probably the strongest in the series after the first film (beating out The Bourne Supremacy, which we’ve discussed, and The Bourne Legacy, which we’ll pretend doesn’t exist). In order to be a good film reviewer, I’ll shelve my boredom with watching Matt Damon glower and try to give you my honest opinion about the film.
The fact of the matter is that, though The Bourne Ultimatum has its problems (which I’ll get to), it does a lot of things right. The action sequences are rarely plodding, and most often manage to impress with the cleverness of their staging. The sequence early on, in which Bourne attempts to guide a dimwitted journalist through a crowd and away from CIA assassins is particularly well done. Greengrass opens up the action in this film, moving it out of narrow European streets and into wide-open spaces filled with numerous moving parts. This proves exceptionally compelling. These scenes make it easier for me to buy into the conceit that Damon is a super-spy than anything in either of the prior two films, simply because we see him managing large amounts of information - people, targets, trains, traffic, etc. - and adapting to multiple changes in real time.
Ideologically this film attempts to progress some of the anti-bureaucracy sentiments of the first two films, and this time presents an intelligence agency that not only is clunky and inept, but that is malevolent too. Watching all of the phone-tapping and record-stealing going on in this movie, it’s hard not to think about recent revelations concerning the NSA and data collection. Privacy being something we are at least nominally still thinking about as a culture makes this movie a little spookier than it probably was upon its release in 2007. David Strathairn’s heart-healthy omelet-eating Deputy Director is an effective villain in that he, given the power to have his agents shoot first and ask questions later, is so far removed from the actual action that he has no qualms taking out anyone, including civilians, that might get in his way. Greengrass is trying to make a Hanna Arendt-esque “banality of evil” point with Strathairn’s character, asking the audience to think seriously about what happens when nebbish office-dwellers are given unmonitored power over the health and well being of others. Not good things, it turns out. Even those concerned with their cholesterol will kill if given the chance.
My problems with this film are two-fold. First, related to my prior comment, though Greengrass points out a particular kind of evil, he doesn’t go any farther than simply noticing it. We are encouraged to think about mundane atrocities, but are not invited, it seems, to think about where this comes from, or why. What is the problem with Strathairn’s character, for example? Should we be frustrated with particular policies that enable a person like him, or should we be upset with bureaucracy in general? The movie leaves the question too vague to be satisfying.
My second problem stems from the first film. My big issue with The Bourne Identity was that it left unexplained the awakening of Bourne’s conscience. This film attempts to answer this question, albeit with all the grace of a tip-toeing gorilla. Bourne chose to be evil from the beginning, we discover, he wasn’t forced to be bad (or, at least, not directly forced) by some nefarious government program. Bourne’s conscience is supposed to be an enigma to us, a miracle of humanity that managed to blossom despite the best efforts of Albert Finney and Co. to keep it in check. While I have zero problem accepting that people are something of a mixed bag, containing the will to do evil as well as good, I think that, in the interest of a functional narrative, something more believable than spotting a target’s kid should have been presented somewhere within these film’s collective runtime.
All this being said, I’ve enjoyed watching these films with you, and look forward to watching something that doesn’t involve either Matt Damon or shaky-cam next.
Love,
Adam
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