Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/5/07
If you watch TV's 24,
you're familiar with the structure. An overall MacGuffin is established
at the outset (Habib Assad has five nuclear warheads within US borders!)
and then, one after another, mini-MacGuffins (We've got to get this witness
out of the building! We need that circuit board!) become totally
pivotal to getting to the main one, until they're immediately forgotten.
While a lone, invincible hero in the field dodges the bullets of anonymous
snipers, a bunch of techies back in some central office tries to either
aid or stop his progress with all their computer wizardry. If you
like that structure, you're gonna love The Bourne Ultimatum, which
provides Matt Damon as Robert Ludlum's memory-challenged superspy with
his most streamlined and efficient vehicle yet. It lacks the heart
of Bourne's first and best adventure, 2002's Bourne Identity, but
it goes about its' business with skill and efficiency, and emerges as a
triumph of craft over relentlessly familiar material.
The action picks up directly
from the end of The Bourne Supremacy, with Jason Bourne (Matt Damon)
on the run from Russian agents. After cleaning up some business from
the previous film, he catches the trail of a journalist (Paddy Considine)
who's gotten a tip about the shadowy government program that made Bourne
the amnesiac killer he is today. That tip has also attracted the
attention of Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), a highly placed intelligence
operative who's in charge of all those shady little operations we need
to keep us safe by, you know, assassinating US citizens and stuff.
Vosen catches on to Bourne's involvement and calls in the last agent to
engage him in the field: Pamela Landy (Joan Allen). Meanwhile,
Bourne's hooked up once again with low-level paper pusher Nicky Parsons
(Julia Stiles) and the two of them try to uncover the mystery of a project
called Blackbriar. This much is clear: if Jason Bourne can
track Blackbriar to its' source, he'll learn the meaning of the memory
flashes he's been getting... and the secrets of his own origin.
At the end of the day, all
this is as irrelevant to what makes The Bourne Ultimatum an enjoyable
two hours as the secrets of warp drive are to a Star Trek movie.
Writers Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Noffi have assembled an
uncomplicated throughline of spy vs. spy action and director Paul Greengrass
executes it with the kind of smooth, impersonal precision that would make
his hero proud. He gets two invaluable assists: composer John
Powell's funky, slam-bang score keeps things moving at a blistering clip
and the first-rate cast does a sensational job selling the material.
Of particular note is Strathairn, who knows his job as the villain and
fills his performance with “Drat! Foiled again!” twitches and slow
burns that allow him to muster the required level of mustache-twirling
evil without taking even a single bite out of the scenery. Allen
is the perfect woman for the “action is my job” role of Landy, and is totally
believable as someone who does their work without ever believing in it.
Once again, the weak link is Stiles, who, as much as anyone working in
A-list movies today, I just never connect with. Nicky Parsons is
a great idea for a character: even evil conspiracies need someone
to make the copies and file the papers, and she was memorably out of her
league in the first movie's climax. But Stiles mostly relies on a
single expression and never lets us inside the mindset of someone who's
always a little too coincidentally everywhere Bourne goes. To the
bitter end, I kept expecting there to be more to Nicky, just as I keep
waiting for Stiles to find the director who can really bring her to life.
Now to Damon. A lot
of people expressed surprise when The Bourne Identity came out that
he could so skillfully play such a cold and lethal character, but for me
he'd already established his deadly bona fides in Dogma. The
Identity performance is one of his best, seemingly a passenger inside
a body that knew how to do a lot more things than he did, and I've kinda
missed that vision of the character in the two Greengrass-directed sequels,
just as I don't think they ever really recovered from killing off Franka
Potente's Marie, who gave Bourne someone to really talk to, and even connect
with. Damon does a first-rate job with his material: I never
doubt for a moment that he can kill you with just about anything he can
get his hands on (even Ford Prefect would be surprised to see a towel do
as much damage as Bourne uses it to). But as written, you can't get
away from the fact that he's pretty much a dilemma in search of a character.
And nothing about the extensive but unsurprising revelations about his
origin changes that.
The action is a little over-edited,
with Greengrass's trademark handheld camera style making it difficult
at times to tell what's going on. But at its' best, it packs some
wallops (love that airborne shot of Bourne flying through a window and
the car chases are excellent as always), and the punishing sound effects
editing is among the year's best. The movie also benefits from its'
globe-trotting shooting schedule, dropping its' hero into locales both
exotic and familiar.
There's nothing special about
The Bourne Ultimatum, but it keeps its' plates spinning for two
entertaining hours. Fans of the series in particular and the espionage
genre in general should be satisfied. And fans of 24 can get
a little “Get all available agents to that train station, NOW!” fix until
their favorite show returns next January. |
