Ten Men and an Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum.


We caught the newest Bourne movie this past week. Pleased to say it lived up to its ridiculous hype.

Bourne movies are a perfect antidote to the James Bond movies, which we've hated for as along as we’ve been alive .* In the Bourne movies, his enemies are the ones who have all the gadgets, and he's left with nothing but his wits (and occasionally a gun, or whatever else he can get his hands on.) In this movie, he’s again trying to evade the CIA, who can track the movement and phone calls of anyone, anywhere, anytime. (There's a nice parallel here with a scene from The Simpson's Movie, where a Gov't analyst inside a giant control room stands up and yells triumphantly “We actually found somebody we were looking for!” )

We loved the first Bourne movie, can’t remember a single thing about the second one, and really liked this one. If you liked any of the first two, we recommend you see this one (and if you did like the 1st two, odds are you’ve already seen it by now.) And we've always have been a Damon fan, and we've seen just about everything he's been in. (But we draw the line at his upcoming appearance on Arthur.)



An animated Matt Damon, posing with Arthur the Aardvark, shortly before stunning Arthur with a blow to his solar plexus, followed by two quick shots to the throat and a leg-sweep, before making off with Arthur's parents' car and heading West to the Pacific City of Bikini bottom, where he hopes to find the key to discovering who animated him.

The first 30 minutes of the Bourne Ultimatum are among the tightest, most exciting we’ve seen in a long time. Great story, great action, and most of it believable. After that, it becomes another chase movie, but it’s still a fun ride all the way though. The story is a nice escalation of the Bourne storyline- now his mission is to find out how he became the super agent that he is today.

Biggest problem we had with the movie is that it featured an appearance by our Action Movie Deal Killer: that inevitable scene where the hero (or the villain) dives through a window and emerges unscathed. It’s an immutable law that no matter how realistic or literal a movie is up to that point, once a character breaks this threshold, it’s all downhill from there and the stunts get more and more ridiculous. This happened in Die Hard 4, another movie franchise originally noted for its believability (remember in Die Hard 1 when he stepped on some glass, and his feet bled for the rest of the movie?) In Die Hard 4, a villain crashes thru a glass wall, and 40 minutes later Bruce Willis is engaging a fighter jet in hand-to-hand combat. Once we see one of these plate-glass scenes, we mentally check out of the movie. In the Bourne Ultimatum it occurred about halfway through the flick, in the middle of an otherwise good cat and mouse sequence. (What was so aggravating about this one was that just before dove thru the window, Bourne stopped to wrap his hands in rags so he could vault over a glass-encrusted ledge w/out cutting his hands….)

But it was a great action movie. Directed by the guy who made the under-appreciated United 93, it's shot in the same way. Feels like the cameraman is one of the characters in the scene, instead of a neutral, perfectly positioned observer. The camera is always moving, and is often a few seconds behind the action. But be warned that it's tough going in the beginning – as the camera zooms thru a Russian warehouse, you're likely to feel seasick until you've adjusted. Not only does it pitch and roll, but it zooms in and out of focus.

Random thoughts:

• Good: A lot of key scenes had no dialog at all. Two scenes stand out where all we see are the eyes of a character as he (and later she) digests the information they’ve just received. Great stuff.

• Bad: Too much time on rooftops. Every chase ends with Bourne on a roof, looking down at his pursuers.

• Bad: For the 3rd time, Julia Stiles shows up, says a few lines, then gets sent away. Only this time, she dies her hair black and leaves looking an awful lot like a young Rosie O’Donnell (emphasis on awful).

• Bad: So the US government trains its supersecret cadre of superkillers…. inside an office building in the middle of Manhattan?

• Good: The fight scenes are great. A hand to hand fight to the death inside a Casablanca bathroom is outstanding.

• Good: Matt Damon as a superspy. We heard someone say someplace that Damon is the perfect choice to play a real-life spy, because he has a look that is instantly forgettable. If you passed him in a crowd you probably wouldn’t even notice him. We agree. We’ve met a few spies (we have it on pretty good authority that we even had lunch with one From The Other Side last summer) and a lot of Navy Seals- each and every time, they were underwhelming. 98% of all Seals we’ve met are under 5’8” tall, and look about as threatening as that lone Caucasian guy stuck working behind the counter at a Dunkin Donuts.

• Great: The music.

• Bad: We found the ultimate revelation – of how Bourne became such a super agent - underwhelming. Apparently consisted of an empty bathroom and a dunk tank.

• David Straithairn needs a haircut.

PS: Before the movie, we saw a preview for Ben Afleck's new movie, Gone Baby Gone, his adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel. Not a good trailer. Made us not want to see a movie we were very much anticipating (and having seen the trailer, we're now wondering if they'll be wicked smaht enuff to subtitle all of Casey Afleck's dialog.) But we're still going to see the movie on opening day, bc:

1) It's the first movie written by either one of these guys since they won the Oscar,
2) It's written by people from, adapted by people from, starring people from, and set in the city of Boston, and
3) We're Big Lehane fans.

PPS: also saw the trailer for Good Luck Chuck, the new Dane Cook movie. Cook looks like a younger Denis Quaid, but with much, much more acne. From what we can tell from the trailer, he mugs for the camera as women throw themselves at him while his fat friend yells exposition to him.

* Yeah, we hate, hate, HATE the bond movies. The only ones we could ever sit through were the ones with the Roger Moore Bond, because in our opinion he played it the only way the material could be played - as camp.