James's Weblog

I really liked The Bourne Identity. I thought The Bourne Supremacy was not as good. I had heard that The Bourne Ultimatum was better and was looking forward to it, but after watching the DVD this past weekend, I think it’s the worst of the bunch. Some spoilers follow.

• Formulaic plot. This isn’t too surprising, but it’s telling that when I talk to friends about the Bourne movies that they ask, “Is The Bourne Ultimatum the third one or the second? What was the second one about?” The movies all feel the same, especially the latter two. The U.S. government is doing naughty things, it doesn’t trust Jason Bourne to mind his own business, so they try to kill him to be safe, which turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy to their own undoing.
• Incoherent plot. The plot elements that were plugged into the formula didn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Bourne goes from Russia (where his escapades from the previous film left him) to France with little explanation, and then he heads off to London with no explanation at all.
• Little-to-no character development. Up until the last few minutes, we didn’t learn anything about Jason Bourne himself. The government agents were all one-dimensional and no different from their analogous characters in the previous films.
• Not enough of Julia Stiles. Admittedly, she probably has a bigger role in this film than in the other two, but it was still pretty small, and it was a lot smaller than I had expected from the trailers and even from the first half of the movie. That the film alluded to some past relationship between her character and Jason Bourne but then abruptly left it unexplained felt like a cheap tease.
• Enough with the chase scenes. The car chase in The Bourne Identity was awesome. The one at the end of The Bourne Supremacy was pretty good too, although it also had a car chase at the beginning, so it already was starting to get a bit tiresome. The Bourne Ultimatum, being no exception, has chase scenes too, and it has them up the wazoo. Chase after chase after chase after chase. And they’re long chases (or they just felt that way since they had gotten boring). One of them involves one person chasing another person chasing another person, so that one probably gets an inordinate amount of screen time to show the extra players. And it’s a foot chase too, so there isn’t even the adrenaline of watching people race Minis down crowded European streets. Nor is there the parkour acrobatics of the foot chase from Casino Royale. I couldn’t wait for the chase to end so we could move on to the subsequent fight scene.
• Bourne’s actual identity is Clark Kent. In the first film, Bourne’s actions seemed mostly within the realm of plausibility (except for the bit about plummeting down a stairwell and using a corpse to cushion his fall). In this third film, however, he’s Superman. He repeatedly rams whatever car he’s driving into whatever he can without getting whiplash. He drives his car off of a multi-level parking garage, doesn’t even land right-side-up, yet walks away unscathed and unfazed. And not even Superman has Bourne’s total omniscience about exactly where all government agents and cameras are positioned and looking at all times.

Ironically, I thought the best scenes were the deleted ones. The scenes actually developed some of the characters (such as showing the CIA Director to be a complete hypocrite) and explained some of the non-sequiturs (such as why Bourne was headed to London). And I always find it odd when scenes shown in the trailers don’t actually end up in the movie (such as when Pamela Landy explains to her superiors that Bourne is really good at staying alive, and trying to kill him just makes him mad).

Oh, and I’m getting a bit tired of Moby’s “Extreme Ways”.