The Bourne Legacy is in the theaters, and so here are some thoughts on the earlier three Bourne films. The connection of these to this web site and politics will come clear as we get to the third of these films.
Matt Damon gains our sympathy in The Bourne Identity as an agent who rebels against killing a target when he sees the man with his son. Found out and twice shot, thrown in the ocean, he loses his memory. Then he finds himself being tracked down by his CIA superiors (Chris Cooper mainly) and targeted for death. He picks up Franka Potente on the way, and both participate in a movie-long chase. The CIA is the “bad guy”, hunting him down, and so it’s easy to like the story. Bourne was one of the bad guys but he’s now on the outs with the Company so we can accept him as a hero.
Although billed as realistic, because it eschews James Bond devices, and although it has a number of realistic touches, it’s still a movie and has elements of pure fantasy with respect to how the CIA operates. I viewed it as strictly entertainment, not as some sort of enlightenment about the CIA. The CIA’s nefarious activities go back for decades. They do engineer coups d’etats. They do employ disinformation. They do all sorts of dirty tricks. False flag events are in their toolkit. With all that and more, I doubt very much that superior A would assassinate superior B or even assassinate an assassin for having not done his job, and that’s the basic plot. I doubt that the Company is that efficient at tracking people and getting new assassins on the spot to kill other assassins. In other words, with all the bad stuff that the CIA does, why concoct stuff that’s too far out?
As entertainment, it’s a decent enough movie. But it tended to run out of steam and continuity toward the end. The other major drawback was the staging and film editing of two fights. These were only partially well done. They were not milked for all they were worth in terms of suspense. In both cases, rapid film shots substituted — and very poorly at that — for genuine fighting and staging. This kind of trickery simply will not do.
This is a picture where I thought the acting outdid the directing. The script had some excellent set pieces, but the director did not get the most suspense out of them. It’s fair to say that Doug Liman did this without being particularly experienced at directing. While he probably did a good job relative to his experience, on an absolute scale a lot was left on the table. It could be that the film editing is the weak spot, because that was too rapid in several places.
At any rate, I’m interested enough to go on to the next two in the series. As for thematic material, the movie doesn’t have much to offer other than the CIA has a bunch of bad guys in it. Maybe that’s new to Hollywood but it’s hardly news for anyone who has looked into the CIA’s activities. I rated this 6 out of 10 (which is average).
Next in line came the Bourne Supremacy.
In Bourne 1, I criticized the film editing as sometimes being too fast, so that the director didn’t obtain the suspense he could have. Bourne 2 is an order of magnitude worse on that score. I wonder whether the film makers could go back and find enough usable footage even to make a decent film. This one has far, far too much rapid quick frame cuts to be effective in telling the story or generating suspense and tension. There are too many times also when it is simply impossible for any normal person to follow the action or even understand what is going on. A 5 is a bit generous. I really should give this a 4. When the camera did slow down, it sometimes did so on action that was unimportant. By going too fast, the viewer missed out on the city backgrounds. The scenes with the Berlin police were hopeless.
Sometimes the best results are gotten from the simplest materials. Whem for example, Bourne is being chased and a cut is made to him going around a corner and disappearing, that is effective. No trick shots. No shaky camera. No fancy editing. No unnecessary camera movements.
I actually had to force myself to sit through the entire film and endure the nonsense sequences.
Matt Damon is excellent. He was just as good here as in Bourne 1. I cannot say the same for the others who play CIA agents. Toward the end, the agent Joan Allen managed to be OK. But early on and the middle, her part was very fake and she was totally unconvincing. But then everyone around her purporting to be CIA agents and looking like young squirts were also unconvincing. The staging was really amateurish, and it tried to get over with the fast cutting. This simply will not do.
Brian Cox, well, he’s just lacking in that gravitas or solid quality of a villain. Someone like Luther Adler would have been superb in Cox’s part. Who could have done Joan Allen’s part? Maybe Ida Lupino, maybe Susan Hayward, but they would have wanted the character built up a bit more. This script had the chance to do that when she confronted Cox a few times, but it failed to carry it off.
The director was Paul Greengrass, whom I’ve never heard of. I’m no expert on modern filmmakers. I just take these things a film at a time and give my honest reactions. I see that Greengrass came up through TV movies. That’s neither here nor there. He seems to have gone for devices that he thought were modern and/or effective in the cuts and shaky camera and moving camera. He overdid it, and what he did became excessive and ineffective. I see that he is directing the last in the trilogy. Let’s see if he learned his lesson. That’s my next to view.
Generally, my disappointment was acute. The story, while simple, could still have been done well. The cinematographer is capable of doing good work and did do some good work. The lighting in the dark scenes is really good. Even some of the fast cut photographs look very good. It’s because of these favorable elements and the acting that I am sorry the overall result came out as it did. You see, what happens is that the techniques dominate the film, rather than serving it.
Last in the three (until now) is the Bourne Ultimatum.
Parts of this movie are excellent, above the earlier two for sure. That includes the opening sequence that gets the movie up to the 26 minute mark. This sequence imagines the CIA tracking a reporter while Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) outwits them and shields him, until the reporter panics. It imagines a technical prowess at tracking that I doubt exists, but it still suggests correctly that with more time an agency like CIA or a combination of such agencies can become omnipresent and extremely oppressive. Next the movies will be showing butterfly and mosquito drones, and they won’t have to rely on cell phones giving away locations.
57 minutes in, the picture once again succumbs to rapid cutting that goes on too long and prevents the viewer from understanding the action. If you cannot see where the people are placed with respect to one another in the Tangier chase, you cannot feel suspense. Everything just becomes a mish-mash. Maybe one grasps the rough outline of the action, but not the detail. This cutting that I’ve already criticized twice before occurs at intervals here too.
The ending is unintentionally laughable. The basic idea is that the CIA has some bad eggs running its black ops, and the good eggs manage to uncover it and expose it. Justice then takes its good ole American course as the bad eggs are arrested for having conducted renditions and assassinations. But this was in 2007, so I suppose it can be forgiven if Hollywood hadn’t yet woken up to the fact that the CIA was up to its ears in black ops, renditions, torture, secret prisons, assassinations, coup d’etats, etc., and had been ever since it started. That’s what it does! Apparently no one in Hollywood ever reads a book or does any research into the actualities. But what’s laughable is its mention that the assassinations are even of U.S. citizens! Ha, ha, ha. Now an American president has declared that he has the right to do such assassinations and he has actually done it by drone. The Hollywoodized treatment of American justice in operation is completely untrue to the reality of these matters. It is MUCH worse than the script writers ever imagined.
Damon plays a solid Nebraska boy who has swallowed the story hook, line and sinker and dedicated himself to “saving American lives” by doing what his bosses tell him, which is to be an assassin. This part is very good indeed, because he is so basically ignorant about the values of justice and rights and so lacking in proper religious training that he is willing to donate his soul to a false God in the CIA with the mistaken belief that he is doing a good thing and a right thing. It’s good for a movie to show this, but I wish that it had brought out the basic conflict far more explicitly and clearly and shown Bourne’s defects of understanding and his naivete too. That would have elevated the movie no end. As it stands, it becomes more a question of a few good eggs versus a few bad eggs. No, the situation is a general one that all Americans face, and it’s a much deeper situation. The CIA does what the president wants it to do and what Congress allows, and the rot is pervasive.
The last chase goes into the realm of fantasy and also total confusion. Realism, which was the hallmark of the Bourne franchise, goes out the window or into a smashed up car from which Bourne emerges with a few bruises. The superman also dives ten stories into the East River. Oh well.
The music became tedious and repetitious after awhile. Joan Allen did better in this one, although her character was too passive at times. I still think that the newer colorless actors here, such as David Strathairn, are missing something as compared with prior generations of Hollywood actors. They do not embody a character and bring it to life well enough. Richard Widmark or Arthur Kennedy would have run away with that part, and then they’d need to play off someone like Ida Lupino in the Joan Allen role. I’m living in the past, I suppose. Frankly, I think Allen and Strathairn have it in them to do a lot better. I think inadequate direction is the key element that’s missing. I thought that Julia Stiles did a notable job here and in the earlier films. She has something.
