![]() ![]() The series’ perennial bridesmaid Julia Stiles comes back briefly to lure Bourne out of hiding, where he’s quite absurdly paying homage to Rambo III in bare-knuckle fight clubs on the Albanian border, knocking his opponents out with one punch while suffering conveniently-timed expositional flashbacks. It Girl Alicia Vikander plays his possibly duplicitous assistant and is somehow even more robotic than she was in Ex Machina. Such an enormous amount of screen time is devoted to him sullenly trudging from place to place, I swear not even Gerry had this many shots of Matt Damon walking.Ī not unamusing Tommy Lee Jones is on autopilot as this installment’s great character actor who paces around a situation room, barking orders and watching the action unfold on screens. ![]() The pacing is logy and missing the series’ signature propulsion. The action sequences are impressive yet underwhelming, brute-force logistical feats that feel disconnected from the humans performing them. Now Bourne’s just a blunt instrument, punching and pounding while Damon glowers and mutters a scant handful of lines. These films were never exactly a barrel of laughs but there was always a wit and some ingenuity to the super-spy’s improvisations. It repeats scenes and set-pieces in pale imitations, joylessly going through the motions while everyone onscreen looks vaguely disinterested. The cheekily-titled Jason Bourne (“we promise it’s not the other guy this time”) lumbers where the original films were fleet. Not a great idea for a bad movie to have a good one blaring on TVs in the background.įor reasons I can only assume involve giant piles of money, Damon and Greengrass have returned at this late date to at long last make their own Bourne Redundancy, and I’m still a bit taken aback by how lousy it is. The whole endeavor is a weird middle finger to the previous picture, which takes place concurrently and scenes from it are seen on security monitors throughout. So complete was the resolution that at the time Damon joked any sequel should be called The Bourne Redundancy.īut franchises gotta franchise, so in 2012 snubbed screenwriter Gilroy took the helm for The Bourne Legacy, an ungainly spin-off with bizarre science-fiction elements (and Jeremy Renner) that rather spitefully reverses Ultimatum‘s triumphant ending by letting David Strathairn’s snarling CIA scoundrel off the hook and sending Joan Allen’s heroic whistleblower to prison for his crimes. I watched it again last week and the thing is still pretty much a miracle of a movie – an almost non-stop 115-minute chase sequence with some beautiful character beats that solves the series’ central mysteries and firmly closes the book on this particular story. Greengrass and Damon famously (and in the press quite contentiously) scrapped writer Tony Gilroy’s screenplay for 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum and for all intents and purposes made up a classic of the genre as they went along. Poor Ben Affleck played Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy adaptation that opened two weeks before The Bourne Identity but felt like it was from a previous century. Bush administration made other espionage pictures seem so suddenly, hopelessly square that even James Bond quickly rebooted to follow suit. The stripped-down, jittery immediacy of the Bourne movies and their unsubtle fear and loathing of the George W. “They should have left him alone,” warned the poster for 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass’ crackerjack sequel to director Doug Liman’s 2002 amnesiac adventure - a sleeper hit that saved Matt Damon’s then-floundering career and revolutionized contemporary action filmmaking in ways perhaps not entirely for the best. Screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse. Starring Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Julia Stiles, Vincent Cassel and Tommy Lee Jones.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |