The Bourne Ultimatum

Written at the time of the film's release...

Bourne ...Again?

I read "The Bourne Identity" decades ago, back when there was still a "Carlos, the Jackal" wandering the Earth, discriminately causing focused havoc and then disappearing. No one had seen him. He had never been photographed, and his reputation as an international terrorist (back in the day, when it had an odd, ghoulish glamour to it) was known world-wide. I bought the book for the "Carlos" angle, and dove into it eagerly.

I hated it. One of the dullest "thrillers" I've ever read, it seemed like it would never end. I wanted to have amnesia just to forget it after finally making it to the last page. It was made into a Richard Chamberlain mini-series which I never saw, and then into a film back in 2002. At the time of its premiere, there was no feeling that it would amount to anything, after all, it starred Matt Damon as Bourne, and his last couple of movies tanked quickly. There'd been a ton of re-shoots and the opening delayed for six months. All bad signs.

So, when I finally caught up with it, I was surprised to find it a good, credible thriller. How? Tony Gilroy's screenplay threw out the book, and kept the "amnesiac assassin" part. Doug Liman's direction kept the thing moving, the fights were spectacular, and even the tired concepts like a car chase through Paris were done with a great deal of panache. It also had a great supporting cast with Famka Potente, Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, Julia Stiles and Clive Owen. Paul Greengrass followed up with an equally spectacular version of The Bourne Supremacy and he's the man in charge of "Ultimatum."

As an exercise in montage, it's absolutely amazing. I rarely saw a shot held for more than five seconds. Greengrass has such a command of what he's shooting and is such a whiz supervising the cut, that you get just enough information to propel you forward--no more, no less--but you never lose a sense of where things are, and the danger the protagonists appear to be in (as opposed to, say, Michael Bay who cuts just as much but never with the discipline of story-telling that Greengrass does). Case in point: there's a long, protracted fight (of course, one of several) in a Tangier apartment. At one point, it heads into the kitchen most of it done in an overhead shot, presumably to hide the stunt-doubles. Now I was watching pretty closely, but, as is inevitable in the kitchen, a knife becomes involved, but I never saw it. I only HEARD it.

Just enough information to advance the plot. It is fascinating to watch.

But despite that, one has to confess that The Bourne Ultimatum has little to differentiate it from The Bourne Supremacy, or The Bourne Identity, other than there are key plot-points, like "The Story Begins" or "A friend is killed." This one picks up immediately where Supremacy ends. Some personal details are cleared up, but it's basically "run to Moscow/London/Tangier/New York and avoid detection/fight/chase." All cleverly done, mind you...but it's barely different from what we've seen before. There is a resolution of sorts, which distinguishes this entry, but that's about it. And, amusingly, the whole thing wraps up with a circular story-telling logic that puts us right back to square one.

"It's over when we've won!" bromides David Strathairn's anti-terrorism "deep cover" head*

With all the room for a sequel that this movie provides, I guess we haven't won yet.

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Now, to be perfectly silly, here is the chance that the Producers had to have a hit song by changing the title to "Bourne 3." My lyrics for the Main Title song are as follows (to the tune of "Born Free")

Bourne "3"
As "3" as a trio
With fights of such brio,
Bourne "3," just like "1" and "2"

Bourne "3"
The Bourne Ul-ti-ma-tum
Not hard to cre-ate 'em
Just change the cars and locales

Bourne "3"
'cuz trilogies make dough!
The box-sets are in the store
in time for number "4!"

Bourne "3"
The last one that I'll see
It just don't intrigue me
Un-less it's freeeee!

* It's another great cast with Joan Allen and Julia Stiles returning--Greengrass makes maximum use of Stiles' lack of expressiveness--Scott Glenn, and Albert Finney, and a seemingly endless supply of stunt actors who look convincing carrying a gun.

The Bourne Legacy

Written at the time of the film's "a-bourning."

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damon's

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity. We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  

Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently). Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.*** 

It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window." 

These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them." They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them. The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them. Legacy has none. It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

* You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

Room (2015)

Inside Out
or 
The Young Person's Guide to Human Cruelty

Room starts with one mystery and ends with another. In between, it warps your mind and makes your realize just how vast the world can be. And how narrow.

It's Jack's (Jacob Tremblay) fifth birthday. He gets up that morning, very excited, announcing to Ma (Brie Larson) that he is, indeed, five, then proceeds his morning greetings of the things in his environment: the chair, the table, the cupboard, the humble things that he is familiar with and has made friends with. His hair is long and has probably not been cut since he was born.

The two watch a little television on a set that is small and has poor reception. Jack thinks the people on the TV are aliens. He has no idea who they are, or where they are, where they come from. Later, he helps Ma make his birthday cake—small, made with few ingredients and a lot of love. He's upset that there are no candles for his cake, but Ma tells him that she needed to get jeans instead. And "Old Nick" can only get a couple things at a time...and then only on Sundays.

 

 

Jack and Ma

Where the hell are we? Is this a bunker in the past or the future? Has there been a nuclear conflagration? Some economic disaster forcing people to live in hovels? What circumstances force them to live like this? And "Old Nick" is a euphemism for Satan—could mother and child be held by some religious cult against their will? One is hesitant to talk too much about the particulars for fear of ruining the surprises and the shocks to the system that the movie brings to the viewer. So, this will, by necessity, be a short review.

But, the opening situation is unusual in that it drops us into a bizarre family life that plays on some of our worst fears in the absence of certainty. It's just mother and child with limited technology and next to nothing as far as available light, which only comes into the space from an overhead skylight. As time goes on and we spend more time with them, clues add to our knowledge of what's going on, and slowly but surely the motives of the mother and child change from survival to escape. 

It must fall to Jack to make the escape, and it's dangerous. He's only five years old, knows nothing of the world beyond the room, and he is tasked with saving himself and the only person he knows in the world. The stakes are high and unknowable to him, but what one worries about is what happens to this test-tube child once he is born again into a world seemingly endlessly from the eight square feet that has been his world.

When that revelation comes, it is amazing (this Tremblay kid is a great little actor), but the movie has far to go. It introduces him to a new world and then turns it upside down, just as it does with Ma. The "room" was never safe, but the outside world isn't, either, where the dangers are unknown and could come around unseen, past every corner. 

The "room" had no unseen corners.

One of the things that causes conflicts and neuroses in people that is either "worked out" by themselves or by therapy is perspective. We are born into our environments, through no fault of our own, and, unless we are very wise or curious, that may be our whole world-view, limited as it is, into adulthood.  That perspective beyond our experience may be what adulthood is—what maturity is—and it is only attained when we burst the bubble of ourselves and our comfort zones. 

Room inspires thoughts like that, which makes me admire it so much. Movies have their "comfort zones" like popcorn and this one definitely thinks (if you will) "outside the box." It stimulates curiosity and puts you in the perspective of real people you might have heard of only in headlines. What is life like for them? 

Room asks "what if?" questions. I like those. "What if" is a great tool for writers and actors, and this film has no uninteresting performances (Brie Larson won a surprising Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress, deserved I thought, even though there are flashier and more studied performances this year—and she's nominated for an Oscar for it as well, which can only increase people's curiosities about this fine film) in a cast full of good actors besides Larson and Tremblay, but also Joan Allen and William H. Macy, the latter turning in a tough, tough performance that is clear-eyed and unsentimental.

This one has stayed with me for a long time.