The Bourne Ultimatum: Three-Fourths Buckwheat
Ann and I went to The Bourne Ultimatum expecting it to be as good as its two predecessors. The first had been a good, solid spy movie, while the Bourne Supremacy had ratcheted up the adrenaline level, the exotic locations, and the stakes.
Unfortunately, The Bourne Ultimatum dispenses with showing us the how–how Jason Bourne can so easily slip between countries, how he can get into a CIA building in a plausible manner, how he manages to survive multiple car wrecks. In addition, The Bourne Ultimatum features Villains Behaving Stupidly and Victims Behaving Stupidly. When the CIA’s number one man in Spain goes on the run…he uses his own passport to travel to Tunisia. For example.
The set pieces are often still amazing–the director, who also did United 93, is an artist–but sometimes overlong, and pointless. When Bourne stages an elaborate ruse in a London subway station in order to talk to a journalist who has information, you wonder why. The cell phone slipped into the man’s pocket during this escapade could as easily have been slipped into his pocket without telling him to come to the station. Bourne could have just talked to him by phone somehow. And, finally, the Silence of the Bourne, which spoke to character in prior films, here just makes you long for something more.
In short, on our buckwheat scale–”buckwheat” being a mob reference in Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead to shooting someone up the ass and letting them die slowly–The Bourne Ultimatum is about three-fourths buckwheat.
August 6, 2007 at 10:31 am
It’s nice to hear a voice of reason.
This film’s received almost unanimous critical praise. The last I checked, it’s scored 94% positive at rottentomatoes.com. But yet, as you pointed out, its action and suspense scenes are light on logic. Not to mention, it’s lacking any real character moments, and is basically a prolonged chase scene. I couldn’t help wish that the characters would stop running, have dinner or something normal, and engage in conversation.
August 6, 2007 at 12:23 pm
While there were definitely a lot of details left out, I can’t agree that drawing the reporter to the train station (Waterloo is a big train terminal, notably for the trains to and from France, as well as an Underground station) didn’t make sense. Getting him out to the station took him outside of any surveillance that was on him in the office and dropped him into a place where Bourne could pick out the physical surveillance. (Off-the-cuff theory is that in a train station, most people are either heading for trains or leaving after getting off trains — people just hanging around are suspicious.) Granted, it could have been a less chaotic location (making it a bit easier to pick out the CIA guys), and it ended up with the poor reporter getting killed, so maybe it wasn’t the best way to go about it.
I agree on the rest, though — it was kind of fun to watch, but definitely a bit light on the detail. And I wasn’t at all impressed by the big confrontation at the end, either, although I was amused by the way they’d “updated” the story so the CIA baddie was justifying hard-core evil in the name of homeland security.
It’s been a (very) long time since I read the earlier Bourne books, and I haven’t read the one this movie was based on, but I suspect that everything made a lot more sense in the original Ludlum. One of the best things about Ludlum (and Forsyth) are the details — the realistic, tedious tradework that lets real people get away with things. It’s much easier (especially in the movies) to just toss in a quick montage or leave that material out entirely, especially if you keep things moving from place to place to place so that (most of) the audience doesn’t notice.
August 6, 2007 at 1:27 pm
He could’ve slipped the phone in his pocket when the guy went to get a sandwich. Or paid someone to do it for him. Either way, the guy was under surveillance, whether in the station or anywhere else.
That’s interesting about the Ludlum–haven’t read any of his stuff.
Jeff
August 6, 2007 at 10:09 pm
And you would think - after three movies - that the CIA would get some curtains for their office windows.