I finally got around to catching The Bourne Ultimatum today, and was generally pleased. I'd have to say that the movie was very much like the two Bourne movies that preceded it, in both the good ways and the bad ways.On the plus side, everything "actiony" about the movie delivers amazingly. For the first two acts of the movie, the pace is outstanding. From the moment the Universal logo leaves the screen, the movie is absolutely relentless. It's tense, exciting, and engaging. You have the kind of experience with the movie that sounds like a cliche, but indeed I found I was "on the edge of my seat," "breathless," and so forth. It was cool.
But the down side of the Bourne series has always been the relative lack of characterization. Like the second movie, this third installment is a pretty straight-up revenge flick, and thus it gets a little "one note" after a while. The movie was in fact so stuffed with action and so thin on character that in the third act, when things actually slow down a bit to offer up the big revelations about Bourne's real history, you can't help but feel a little let down. And it doesn't help that the truth ultimately revealed really is a letdown. The truth of Bourne's identity as revealed at the end of this movie is so straight-forwardly simple, you wouldn't even really stop to guess that it was coming. You'd assume the writers would come up with something more clever.
Still, whatever might be lacking, the bulk of the film is undeniably exhilarating. I give it a B.
5 comments:
I liked it too, with the exception that I'm going to send Paul Greengrass a frakking tripod!!
I like how this particular trilogy of films mesh very well together. The first film is still the best, but the overall work isn't bad. Supremacy and Ultimatum aren't a waste of time.
I don't know if the ending was supposed to revolve around "the big reveal." It was about Bourne finally unraveling his life back to where it went wrong, then starting over, baptized by the East River, after his baptism in the ocean started this journey.
Did anyone else confuse Albert Finney and Brian Cox in their brain when they first saw him in the flashback?
I liked the movie a lot. Thin on characters, but still pretty clever (for an action movie).
And yeah, the tripod (or lack thereof)...
I suspect I ended up with a bad batch of nacho cheese sauce when I sat down in the movie theater, because I felt nauseous going into the trailers (my "meal" was almost over at that point).
Add to this Greengrass's style of "we shot this on a plane during a frikkin' crash" filmmaking, and you get the idea. I didn't throw up, but I got pretty close on one or two occasions. The long walk home felt really good after that. I don't think I could have gone through any sort of ride anyway (planes, trains and automobiles...).
FKL
For the record, I think I liked the second movie a bit better than the first one.
I just felt more "real" (whatever that means in a case like this) to me. I remember being REALLY pissed by the corpse-surfing in the stairwell at the end of the first movie.
FKL
A yes.... corpse surfing. Forgot about that momentary flight of fancy. (Funny, when everyone talked about how "real" the Bourne movies seemed next to the Bond movies.)
There were only two times I found myself really conscious of the crazy shaky cam:
1) In the very beginning of the film, during the exposition scene among all the agents. Basically, the scene was just shoe leather for anyone who didn't see the first two Bourne movies. But the whole thing was filmed with the same drifting, unstable camera. This was people SITTING at a table, mind you. Very distracting.
2) During the "apartment fight" after the rooftop chase. There was so much motion, so many extreme close-ups, and so many quick cuts, I think that fight could have taken place between sock puppets, and we wouldn't have known.
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