The Case for Being Bourne Again

Matt Damon is back as Jason Bourne in the Bourne Ultimatum, the third movie of the Bourne trilogy. The Bourne movies are known for their gritty, realistic (well, relatively so) action sequences that have inspired the “return to reality” of franchises like James Bond, and their nauseating use of a hand held camera is legendary. This was what I was expecting from the third movie, and I got it in spades.

In such an environment, Matt Damon lives up to the caricature of him made famous in Team America: World Police. His acting chops are really given nothing to do, as his karate chops define his character. A stunning (yet almost incomprehensible) fight scene in a Tangiers apartment made my teeth and neck ache in sympathy, and the breathtaking (yet highly implausible) stunts were a wonder to behold in this age of rampant digital enhancement. Jason Bourne’s ability to tell shatterproof glass from highly shatterable glass was put to a lot of use this time around, and I hate to think of the number of easily influenced people who will now try reversing their cars of multi-storey parking buildings and expect to come out with a bit of a limp that should resolve itself within a few hours.

Around the action was some semblance of plot and other characters. Joan Allen appeared as a painfully thin CIA boss, Julia Styles was wasted as a doe-eyed unrequited-love object of Jason Bourne, and there were other people who rapidly shouted in acronyms and euphemisms and looked worried a lot of the time. I would love to know what the actors playing the computer operators actually do bang away on their keyboards while pretending to hack into secure systems or bring up suspect profiles from foreign databases.

The audience were treated as Americans: “Paris, France” and “Madrid, Spain” descriptions tagged the aerial shots of these fairly distinctive cities, while “New York City” and “West Virginia” were classified as nation states of their own. The strength of the Anglo-American alliance was once more confirmed as the CIA ran roughshod over British authorities, security and rule of law, while the Spanish and Moroccan police were shown as efficient and competent. Funnily enough, the end result seemed to be that the CIA was responsible for more acts of terrorism than most official terrorist organisations – not sure if that was entirely the image they were going for, but at least they used fancy technology and martial arts to do it (funny how most of the CIA’s assassins looked “Arabic” or “Muslim” this time around).

In the final analysis, the two hour film absolutely flew by as the action swept me along to a satisfying (albeit fairly predictable) ending. The evil men were punished, the good men and women were vindicated. Not a film to challenge the mind (in fact it helps not to think about it at all), but one to enjoy for the sheer, unvarnished and unbridled action.

Verdict: Action flick rating of 8 out of 10; Thought-provoking drama on international espionage and personal relations rating of 2 out of 10.