Catch-up 2

And here is the second one from last year. The Harry Potter review was roughly 500 words. This one, of The Bourne Ultimatum, is 1,500 words, displaying versatility in writing-up.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Four Stars out of Five
The summer of sequels continues with the Matt Damon action-adventure vehicle the Bourne Ultimatum, the third in the series, hoping to join the gravy train. Paul Greengrass, fresh from missing out on best director Oscar for United 93 thanks to Martin’s Scorcese’s Lifetime Achievement Award, is back in the director’s chair for a second dosage of what is referred to as the antidote to 007.
Jason Bourne is the agent on the loose whose mind was scrubbed, but after a trauma, he would like to have a bit more colour instead of it being whiter then white. His erstwhile employers in US intelligence seek to blank out his life in addition to his memory. Ultimately, Bourne ensures that their training of him rebounds on them. It’s a set-up that’s worked well so far, but how far can you stretch a winning sequence?
Once again, trouble finds the isolated but far from hapless Bourne rather than vice versa. This time it’s a leak to the media that sends the Central Intelligence Agency into a frenzy. This leak regards the moral outrage around which the film rotates, namely that the CIA has reduced itself to the hi-tech equivalent of a two-bit Central American death squad. The War on Terror is the conflict that dare not speak its name. Following the loosening of checks and balances by the top men in Washington, all ‘black-ops’ have been rolled into one seriously badass department where anything is permissible, even execution, as if the CIA has never sanctioned assassinations before.
Greengrass has made clear to the public his critical posture to the use of torture and the euphemistically entitled extraordinary rendition. We get to see a fair bit of water-boarding, which frankly does the cause of those who seek its abolition no good, since it looks like an upmarket way of someone having their head dunked in a toilet. For a movie constantly on the move, it doesn’t choose to rachet up the tension via continuously watching someone’s head being held under water for five minutes or more or place the emotional stress of believing you’re going to drown. As for sleep deprivation, I’ve seen people in a worse state after a midnight movie marathon. For these techniques and others to be discussed in a matter-of-fact way in a moral free environment within the hidden recesses of big government, is a little too obvious in its manipulation in favour of the director’s liberal sensibilities. This is not the film to be dealing with such pieties; let’s get on with the action.
An awful lot of free promotion takes place - sometimes laughably, it’s so in your face - for the favourite newspaper of regular Guardian reader Greengrass; in fact, there’s more general product placement than Bond. Forget Bourne being the anti-JB - he’s the über-JB!
There’s also more than a few escapades that Britain’s most famous spy could relate to. A chase across the rooftops of Tangiers is reminiscent of The Living Daylights and also driving a car off the top of a multi-storey car park á là Tomorrow Never Dies, though Bourne is hard enough to stay in the car while he’s doing it. When Bourne nicks a police car in New York, it enters the realm of Grand Theft Auto, which is so much more than a game. But there’s one film it really bears close comparison with. Shaky camerawork, tick. Man on the run from a government conspiracy, tick. If bad guys were to be any more wired the only language they would be speaking is binary, er, tick. Yes, it’s Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State. Maligned by high-minded critics, it may not have the travel brochure of the Bourne trilogy, but it packs a punch. Ridley’s little brother though has not been the toast of Hollywood since he directed the Tarantino-scripted True Romance. Greengrass claims to be allowed to do whatever he wants. His is the star in the ascendancy. And so he is allowed to follow his agenda that would like you to believe that whenever you hear of a bombing in the Middle East, don’t dismiss out of hand that its origins may have been closer to home.
On the fleshing out of the plotline, Damon does a reasonable job of the driven rogue agent and man of few words, though I do prefer the turn given by the marionette in Team America: World Police. The acting journey taken by Julia Stiles since Save the Last Dance has not been a long one, with her here resembling old oak floorboards, in a performance creaking throughout. Stiles’ expressions are of the stop-action motion picture halted after one take with a constantly concerned look branded on her face, unless it was method acting for the support role in a Mr Sheen advert. As Stiles is a stalwart from the first film, Greengrass (who was not on board then), truly lumbered with her, would be fully justified as a workman blaming his tools and demanding a refund from the timber mill.
As for the other prominent thesps, Joan Allen has kept herself in great shape and just about manages to convince as the conscience of the CIA. David Strathairn laps up his role as the smooth, debonair senior operator who has shunted his conscience into early retirement. It is to his profit that the role assigned was more plausible than the one Allen had to work with. Albert Finney is, as ever, Albert Finney in that you don’t think of his character as ‘Albert Finney playing someone’. Stiles, take note.
There are plenty of scrapes down side alleys on all manner of vehicles and virtuoso fight scenes that leave you gasping for air, but in trying to top all this, the quick-cutting car chase in NYC gets a bit confusing - so he smashed into who; is he going backwards, forwards or sideways? If only all of us were possessed of Bourne’s super-efficient brain. The style Greengrass adopts obviously has the blessing of executive producer Doug Liman (at the directorial helm of The Bourne Identity) as it did with The Bourne Supremacy.
The ingenuity of Bourne is again to the fore. In Supremacy, he stuffed a rolled-up magazine into a toaster, knocked on the gas and so as he left while the enemy agents entered, the house blew up. Nothing so explosive on Bourne’s part here but he does do something clever with an electric fan and a flashlight. There is sophistication in plot development as well, with a superbly smart converging of the timelines of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. Try and catch Supremacy before watching Ultimatum and you’ll see what I mean (and probably have a better understanding too).
I liked it when Bourne told the wet Guardian journalist Simon Ross played by actual freelancer Paddy Considine that “This is real life, not a news story!” Though that could be read two ways, the film demonstrates it with an implied scepticism that you do not find real life in the pages of newspapers. I bet Considine’s character wishes he had accepted that Iraq posting now. Flashbacks are a notoriously difficult concept to insert without self-parody into a film but Greengrass handles their intrusion tastefully here. The only moment when alarm bells were ringing in my head rather than in the film, was the existential angst felt by a CIA ‘asset’ (a sort-of Bourne Mk II) that Bourne had spared. It threatened the credibility of the fabric of reality the film had built up but luckily was over soon. Such themes, a digression on the writers’ parts, are not the preserve of such a film since they cannot be given the justice of proper exploration.
Inevitably in such a fast-paced film, there are going to be some holes and slip-ups that the editors and producers missed. For me, a cardinal one in Supremacy was that Bourne was a Russian linguist and cultural expert, yet in Moscow he got into a licensed cab which can be easily tracked (and anyway they overcharge you), when any person who knows even a smidgen about Russia would hail a civilian car to take you to your destination. The speed about which Ultimatum progresses means you might not notice it at the time, but on reflection seem quite glaring, such as neighbours not waking up nor dogs roused at the first clatter of gunfire, but doing so when Bourne intentionally lets off a few rounds of his own. Allied to the grievous display of product promotion and the equally, if not more so, grievous display of Stiles, it’s these niggles that bring it down to very good from five star.
Ultimatum extensively ties in with its two ‘predecessors’. This gives it a pleasing finality that Paul Greengrass can look back on with satisfaction. As his modus operandi is to alternate between high-powered drama and high-powered action, it will be fascinating to watch him choose his projects to maintain the balancing act that has produced such exalted expectations, with Alexander Payne his closest competitor in his age range. With the Bourne films behind him, what turbo-charged film has Greengrass his eye on for two years hence? James Bond, anyone?