This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.
Movie #37: The Bourne Ultimatum
First of all, I would like to thank Robert Ludlum for titling this initial Bourne trilogy of his to fall sequentially into alphabetical order. I appreciate that on behalf of my neuroses.
Secondly, I made a point to look at The Bourne Ultimatum with a critical eye to the fight scenes, and I still contend that director Paul Greengrass (who also helmed The Bourne Supremacy) orchestrates a tight, controlled chaos in his action sequences. The chase scene through Tangiers, and the culminating fight between Damon’s Bourne and the asset sent to kill him and Nicky (Julia Stiles), is shot close and fast, but is still orienting enough for the audience to track all of the action. And what action it is. Tense, thrilling, slow and cautious in places, panicked in others. Nicky is fleeing Desh (Joey Ansah), not knowing where Jason is. Desh is chasing Nicky, thinking Jason’s dead. And Jason is chasing Desh to prevent him from killing Nicky. It’s fantastic.
It is weird, though, that Nicky doesn’t say a single word to Bourne after that. There are two or three scenes where they’re together, before she goes on the run without him. He’s talking to her, but she only ever looks at him with so much clearly on her mind — questions, regrets, fear, resignation — and never says a word. It’s odd. Not that I think it takes away from, again, Nicky’s strength as a female character in this series. She makes smart, thoughtful decisions at lightning speed. She acts quickly, hurrying away from Desh when she knows he’s after her, destroying her phone so she can’t be tracked, always keeping an eye out, but never dissolving into tears or whimpering while trying to hide. She’s constantly on the move, and her intelligence and calm helps her elude him. Really well done.
Joan Allen also returns as our indefatigable Pamela Landy, and once again she is fearless and determined. The end of The Bourne Supremacy teased the scene where Bourne calls her in New York, but what it didn’t reveal is that Pamela reached out to him, paging his old alias at the airport so he would know she had information for him and she was not a threat. Pamela has determined that her counterpart CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) is hiding something and is up to no good. And while he has a team of agents, she has loyal agents of her own and works in unspoken concert with Bourne to mislead Vosen, to expose Blackbriar, and to lead Bourne to the Blackbriar training facility, where his identity as a CIA asset was formed. And when she’s exposed the operation, and is confronted by Vosen, she doesn’t even flinch. She tells him she hopes he has a good lawyer and she walks out the door LIKE A BOSS. Not even kidding, I would watch an entire trilogy of movies about Pamela Landy.
And so Blackbriar is exposed, and Jason Bourne is free. Noah Vosen and Blackbriar head honcho Albert Hirsch (Albert Finney) are arrested and charged with all kinds of illegal activities. (Fun fact: In Hirsch’s CIA file that Landy is reading in one scene, it lists Hirsch’s place of birth as Utica, NY, which is more or less where I grew up.) And Jason Bourne jumps-slash-falls into the East River from ten stories above, possibly with a fresh bullet wound somewhere on his body. We are treated to a shot almost identical to the opener in The Bourne Identity, when Bourne is found shot and unconscious in the sea. The news report informs us that his body has not been recovered, though, and Nicky smiles a secret smile as we cut to Jason regaining consciousness in the water and swimming away.
That secret little smile is my favorite part of this truly excellent movie.
Viable Option 