|
Bourne Free THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM Directed by Paul Greengrass Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown Need setup? Tough shit. You've had two movies for that. The Bourne Ultimatum starts at a flat sprint, accelerates to a thundering gallop, and before the halfway mark is scorching the Mach barrier. In these films, Paul Greengrass (and before him, Doug Liman) have perfected a new breed of shorthand storytelling. That this much information can be managed with such deft acuity while still retaining narrative momentum is unlike anything else happening in American action cinema today. And in terms of "cut to the chase," oh, how I loves me some thirdsies. Other people prefer second chapters, for their inherent ambiguity and narrative darkening; I like watching a master storyteller pull all the attendant threads towards the middle like every single one of them has been heading there all along - and then blow everything up real good. Ultimatum doesn't disappoint in this regard; if it's not as gloriously sharp as Supremacy, it's about twice as skullfuckingly dense and nearly three times meaner. Jason Bourne's identity crisis continues in this "final" chapter, drawing him to the heart of the mystery of his stolen memories, his unwanted life as a black ops killer, and the shadowy men pulling his strings. How "final" this flick will be remains to be seen, of course; from what I can recall of the synopsis of the Robert Ludlum novel that shares Ultimatum's name, these movies aren't terribly dependent on their souces any more, so who knows how many more of these things an addle-brained studio executive might seek to crank out once he's seen the weekend grosses. Above all, the Bourne trilogy is seeming proof that quality will out: if you actually make better and better movies - and there is little denying that each successive Bourne has been an even more impressive clockwork than the one before - the audience won't just come back, but will in fact multiply. Better give 'em something to come back for, then. Matt Damon's road on this trek hasn't been an easy one; I cannot recall a less likeable protagonist in a Hollywood action movie in a very, very long time. If it weren't for the inherent pathos of Bourne's seeming situation (a situation which, as thirdsies will insist, must be torn apart and shown a lie by the end of these proceedings), we'd probably hate the guy right from the off. As it is, however, Damon is called upon to emote a wee bit more this time than last, and move faster and with more deadly precision than ever before. There can be no denying it: the majority of the fun of Bourne as a character is just watching this tough fucker do tough shit, at which he excels. We wish we could all be so handy with a flashlight and an electric fan. Julia Stiles gets to fill the mandatory Female Lead void left vacant by Franka Potente in the previous film, an emotional transition made slightly less bumpy via the convenient expediencies of Bourne's ever-widening memory wipe. Stiles' role continues to be one of the most abysmally sexist in Hollywood cinema: her newly-retconned prior relationship with Bourne now casts her near-abusive engagements with him in the previous films in an even darker light, while in Ultimatum, she is called upon to do little more than provide information and re-enact Marion Ravenwood's Cairo run-from-the-bad-guy scene (with a minor location swap to Tangier). Still, Stiles' presence is a welcome breath of emotional air in the otherwise by-the-numbers non-feeling of the Bourne franchise, and if the scene of her dying her hair veers wildly into the creepy, then at least we can assume that it's probably supposed to. (Nothing, it seems, makes Jason Bourne hotter than a rinse-in brunette.) Joan Allen returns to her plum role as Pamela Landy, who is (evidently) the only decent agent in the entirety of the American intelligence industry. Her track runs nicely parallel to Bourne's, as they both realize that they want the same thing and can help each other get it. Allen's opposite number this time (previous baddies having been routinely dispatched in the prior films) is David Strathairn, who has a tough row to hoe to be anything other than an utterly repentunt fucktard. Brian Cox and Chris Cooper were marginally more effective in bringing some dimension to the shadow ops, but sadly, they're nowhere in sight this time, not even in flashbacks. Greengrass mounts a virtuoso run-and-jump in Waterloo station in London, and a shorter, more brutal car chase in the streets of New York. He sends nameless assassin after nameless assassin after Bourne throughout the film, to the point where one wonders exactly what these guys do with the rest of their time when they're not waiting for the cell phone to deliver deadly text messages. As usual, however, the real fun is in watching the narrative switchbacks when Bourne gets one over on his dogged pursuers, never better than when the closing scene from Supremacy is revisited in real time and in new context, giving Bourne the opportunity to break into yet another completely-unbreakable government facility. Honestly, if they'd just stop hunting the dude for ten minutes, the government could employee him as QA testing for access passes. So what's it all in service of? Well, you'd be surprised, but I won't ruin the partially-coherent thematic fun. The true problem with the notion of continuing this franchise is simply one of physics - if these things start revolving any faster, the crank shaft is going to go. Ultimatum, in its finest moments, seems to attain the flawless symmetry of a perpetual motion machine, and when all things revolve back to the beginning in this film's final moments, the sense of narrative satisfaction is optimistic and earned. In real terms, I don't think this thing can be done any better than it's been done here, so there's a sense of relief to hearing Moby's "Extreme Ways" light up a third and final time as the endless circuitboards of the closing credits resolve into Jason Bourne's face. Thank you, Jason; your assignment is over.
|