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The Bourne Ultimatum
Reviewed By Rich Drees
After a summer blockbuster season that contained a myriad of films
that, for better or worse, placed the staging of their action set
pieces over such concerns as story logic and intelligence, The
Bourne Ultimatum comes as a refreshing, if somewhat paranoid,
change of pace. The film is a smart thriller that successfully taps
into growing concerns about government intrusion into its
citizenry’s private lives, illegal operations performed in the name
of national security and the disturbing lengths that they may go to
protect their secrets.
Matt Damon’s
Jason Bourne is still on the run, trying to track down the forces
that created him to be an unstoppable killer for the CIA. His
investigations lead him from the assassination of a British
journalist who came close to discovering the truth to the streets of
Madrid, across the rooftops of Tangier to the streets of midtown
Manhattan. Attempting to stop him is Vsoen, a CIA director (David
Strathairn) in charge of the agency’s highly classified, highly
illegal black ops. Called in to assist Vosen, and provide a
convenient
scapegoat if their work becomes public, is Pamela Landy (Joan
Allen), a CIA agent who had tracked Bourne before and who begins to
develop a repulsion for the type of work that Vosen’s division is
doing.
Not so much a sequel to 2004’s Bourne Supremacy, Ultimatum
the second of two interlocking puzzle pieces with the previous film.
The main plot of Supremacy ended with a wounded Bourne
limping off into the darkness of a Moscow street, with a coda set an
indeterminate time later where Bourne contacts Landy in New York
City. A majority of Ultimatum rests comfortably between these two
scenes, opening with Bourne escaping Moscow police and the phone
call coda provides the plot point that sets the film’s finale in
motion.
Director Peter
Greengrass has crafted a film that visually imparts to its audience
the tensions and urgency that Bourne is feeling at any one time in
the film. Scenes where Bourne knows that he is under observation
from public security cameras drip with a tension that plays on one’s
own fears of Big Brother-style unwarranted surveillance. The fights
in the film are brutal, staccato ballets. No one gets comedic
one-liners to punctuate the action. Here Greengrass puts us in the
midst of the fights, where the only sounds are the grunts of combat
and the crunch of bone and cartilage being beaten against each
other.
If there’s
anything disappointing about the film, it is that Bourne seems to
have found the answers he’s looking for and is at peace. Greengrass
even apes the opening shot of the franchise’s inaugural film The
Bourne Identity (2002) as a way of bookending the films. A few
more thrillers of this caliber would be a welcome change from the
usual being served by Hollywood. |
