Adam,
I am so sick of Jason Bourne and his increasingly indistinguishable line of The Bourne Nouns. At this point, I would much rather watch one of our suggested additions to the franchise: The Bourne Congeniality (in which Jason Bourne enters a beauty pageant), or The Bourne Adjacency (in which Jason Bourne stands next to things).
Watching these movies now has revealed fissures and weak points that went mostly unnoticed at the time of their release, I suspect, amid critics’ joy at having movies to review that didn’t contain exploding robots. The wait time between theatrical releases probably also went a long way towards smoothing over flaws that were accentuated by the super-condensed time frame in which we watched all three movies. Furthermore, that The Bourne Ultimatum is a better-than-catastrophic third entry in a franchise undoubtedly endeared it to audiences and boosted it up to a rarified category along with precious few other films.
But what does work about this movie? The action sequences, for one. But after two movies’ worth of the stuff, it seems almost beside the point to comment on how skillfully they were staged—millions of dollars went into all those stunt doubles and parkour consultants. If those scenes weren’t good maybe then they’d be worth discussing. Honestly, the only one that, for me, rises above a sturdy but ultimately uninspiring competence is the one you mentioned, where Bourne has to maneuver both himself and a hapless journalist out of trouble. That scene demonstrates exceptional creativity within restraints and finishes on a powerfully unexpected note.
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As you discussed, Ultimatum also carries on the Bourne movies’ willingness to point out the bureaucratic origins of wide-reaching government mischief—timely then in the context of the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, etc., and perceptive now given current scandals with the NSA. Like you, though, I wish the movie didn’t mistake pointing out a problem with having real insight into it.
Ultimately, though, a movie—especially a blockbuster affair like this one—doesn’t need to have deep thoughts about current affairs or much-better-than-competent action scenes to be successful. What’s really missing for me in this film is the emotional content. Two movies ago, The Bourne Identity managed to elicit pity and tenderness for a character whose physical dominance would normally raise him above such vulnerability. Bourne’s terror, confusion, and moral turmoil felt real. Even as he was punching his way out of danger he conveyed a cornered animal desperation that gave the first movie its emotional and ideological center.
The succeeding Bourne movies haven’t really done much to develop that tone. The more people Bourne dispatches, the more ably he evades CIA capture, the more times he pulls a BECAUSE I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU-style gambit, the harder it is to remember the origins of the character. The sequels could have gotten around that problem by consciously reinventing aspects of Jason Bourne, the way Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade realized it couldn’t keep rehashing its main character’s romantic appeal and pivoted to explore his emotional neediness through the foil of his father. Each Bourne sequel just tries to double down on making us feel sorry for Bourne without really lingering on the specific feelings involved, depending on flashbacks as a kind of shortcut to emotional resonance. Again and again in this film we’re told that Bourne sacrificed everything to the Treadstone program, but what did he sacrifice that he really seems to miss?
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If it sounds like I’m being rough on Ultimatum, as well as Supremacy, it’s not because I dislike action or mainstream or franchise films. I’ve already mentioned Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as an example of a successful franchise entry, and in fact, the Indiana Jones series serves nicely as a case study to compare with the Bourne series. Both series feature rugged-yet-sensitive male protagonists, both enmesh their heroes in the shadowy dealings of international politics, both express bitter resignation at the chicanery and short-sightedness of government officials, both take place across a variety of exotic locales, and both contain their fair share of ludicrous plot elements.
So what is it that makes Jones superior to Bourne?
I would suggest three things: a lack of embarrassment about the conventions that go along with genre and serialization, a healthy sense of absurdity, and most important of all, good writing.
Indiana Jones never forgot its original inspirations—1930s and ‘40s boys’ adventure tales, particularly the kind found in pulp magazines—and joyfully recreated the tone and imagery of those sources, in the process transcending them. The series’s comfort with serialization meant
that it was willing to mix up its own formula before it got stale. The Bourne movies, especially the Greengrass features, seem so intent on trading out the pulpier aspects of the Ludlum novels for Serious Political Commentary that they lose out at both. At their lowest, the Bourne movies contain none of the fun of a spy romp and none of the charge or heft of a political thriller. Furthermore, the sequels’ dogged adherence to a single plot thread—who is Jason Bourne?—long after that device ceased to have emotional significance can make for a grueling slog indeed.
That self-seriousness also sets Bourne a fair distance apart from Indiana Jones, which always remembered that its chief mission was to entertain. To that end, the Indiana Jones movies embraced preposterousness, nurtured chaos, and cherished irony. Bourne follows the trend of mid-2000s blockbusters for whom darkness, edginess, and solemnity were the highest virtues, sometimes at the expense of nuance, character, and dialogue.
Which brings me to my last point. “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” There is not a single line that good in the entire Bourne franchise.
Reflecting back on both sets of movies, and looking back at the other blockbusters that have followed since then, what becomes apparent is that we are really just looking at a predictable pattern of seesawing trends. This generation of audiences may be moving away from the style of Bourne and back towards jokiness (see: the Marvel movies, especially Iron Man, The Avengers, and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy). Of course, Indiana Jones is an uncommonly great example of blockbuster moviemaking of any style, and none of the contemporary blockbusters I just named (Guardians of the Galaxy excepted) even approaches it in terms of originality, tone, character, iconography, or writing.
I guess what I want to point out is that there are drawbacks to any style or genre. The fact that overcoming those drawbacks to achieve greatness is so hard necessarily means that most movies will not be great.
The Bourne Ultimatum is a good, not great, movie. Not an embarrassing thing to be, by any stretch. What we as audiences have to do, though, is hold out for the great ones.
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Love,
Victoria
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