MY MOVIE SHELF: The Bourne Ultimatum

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.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Bourne Supremacy

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 #36: The Bourne Supremacy

The Bourne Supremacy is a transitional movie, there is no denying it. Its structure and purpose is to get us from where we were in The Bourne Identity, to where we have to be in The Bourne Ultimatum. But where most transitional movies fall short, not supplying enough of a plot of their own to stand as separate films, this one focuses on the twist of a conspiracy within the former Treadstone, tying together the first film with the third, but also working as its own separate mystery.

It starts with some nefarious goings on in Berlin that thwart the operation of CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) that will set her hot on Bourne’s trail. We are brought back to Jason and Marie still living in bliss off the grid in India, and then Marie is quickly dispatched by some bad guys (by accident — they were after Bourne) because she has served her purpose as a plot device in the last film and her death will serve as motivation for Bourne in this one.

This time the structure is different, because the audience knows who Bourne is now, and knows he’s being framed for something. What that something is will be resolved by the end, but it will also provide a window into the events of the next movie, where everything is laid bare. We even get two closing scenes that will carry into the next movie: Bourne’s meet up with Irena Neski in Russia, immediately after which Ultimatum will pick up, and a scene much later in the timeline, that will feature prominently near the climax of Ultimatum, when Bourne is back in New York, calling Landy from a rooftop with a clear view of her through an office window — a trick used to get effect earlier in this film as well.

Julia Stiles is back as Nicky, and while she does do some grovelling here, it’s while Damon’s Bourne has a gun to her head, so I’ll allow it. Joan Allen’s presence only adds to the strength brought to the film by Nicky — she’s decisive, authoritative, intelligent, focused, and in charge. I’m not sure if the film technically passes the Bechdel test, given that Nicky and Pamela only talk about Bourne, but since Bourne is the target of a CIA investigation that is their job and not some dude one or both of them happen to be crushing on, I’m going to say that it does, which, for action films, is kind of a big deal.

I always watch these movies, with Bourne in and out of almost every different country in Europe, with a bit of curiosity about the feasibility of that. I know he’s a super spy or whatever, but as a regular person, how easy is it to just travel across Europe? Having only ever been across the ocean to England, I don’t really know. I think that means a trip to France is in order. And maybe Russia. I took Russian in college, so any movie set in Russia (which this is, at the end), I always watch intently for Cyrillic, trying to at least sound out the words, even if I have no chance of gauging what they mean. Here the Cyrillic goes by a little too fast for me to do it without slowing the movie down, so I don’t really catch most of it.

However, even with its frenetic pace and furiously chaotic chase and fight scenes, The Bourne Supremacy still is filmed in such a way as to allow me to follow what’s happening in the chase or brawl. More and more recently, films are sequencing these things so chaotically, with such close and quick-cut editing, that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. This one, it’s still quite clear. We’ll have to see if that changes by the time we get to The Bourne Ultimatum.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Bourne Identity

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 #35: The Bourne Identity

What people forget about Matt Damon is that he actually was a working film actor long before Good Will Hunting. He even had a lead in a movie — The Rainmaker — that came out about a month before (both were fall 1997). What no one forgets about Matt Damon, however, is that the role of Jason Bourne, starting here with The Bourne Identity in 2002, completely changed the trajectory of his career. He had always been funny, and he’d been a “serious” actor for years, proving his chops not just in Good Will Hunting but in The Talented Mr. Ripley as well. But Bourne made him an action star, and for an actor, there is simply nothing more bankable than an honest-to-god action hero.

The best thing about the Bourne movies in general, and The Bourne Identity specifically, is its tense pace. There are brief moments to catch one’s breath, have a romantic interlude, whatever, but then we’re immediately on to the next obstacle, the next threat. And the fact that no one really knows — not even Bourne himself — whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy, keeps the adrenaline pumping. Is he escaping the clutches of villains or is he eluding capture from the law? Truth is, it’s a little bit of both, and that works too. There is a simple through-line: Get away.

Everything is kept simple on purpose, actually. A complicated mystery would clog the story, so we’re given the simplest one: Who is he? Other questions arise along the way, answered in bits and pieces — the audience finding out when Jason does — but they all revert to that central question and Bourne’s driving force. Who is he?

I always felt the resolution that Bourne stopped himself in his final mission for Treadstone because of the children present was a bit too pat, as if Robert Ludlum himself, author of the original novels the films were based on, felt a need to give the audience something truly heroic about Bourne to empathize and sympathize with. I’m not sure it needs it, frankly. But I’ll take it.

I’ve always liked Julia Stiles, and I enjoy her here as Nicky. It’s a small role that could be considered thankless, but I’ve always found it encouraging that in this stealth and dangerous organization peopled almost entirely by men, here’s this young woman in this very precarious position in a field office/safe house, who is strong and calm and focused on her job. She doesn’t fall into that emotional breakdown space that a lot of women are forced to in these types of movies when men are shooting and fighting and dying, and I appreciate that.

I also like the end, where the asset we’ve been led to believe is after Bourne turns out to have been after Conklin (Chris Cooper) all along, and in the tiniest of glimpses, we see a Congressional hearing with a mention of Blackbriar — a sequel teaser that is so well-hidden between the Conklin hit and Bourne’s triumphant return to Marie (Franka Potente) just before the closing credits, that if the movie had bombed it could have been completely discarded without anyone being the wiser. However, with the movie being the blockbuster success it was, it gives astute viewers a small taste of what’s to come.