Lots of movies fade in gently from black. The Bourne Ultimatum just cuts to the chase. Literally. Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin is out of breath from the opening frames, and doesn’t get a chance to rest at all in the next hundred-odd minutes. Where some movies have action sequences, The Bourne Ultimatum has nothing else. Picking up moments after where the second film ended, the plot is a minimalist’s dream. There’s some back-story, and a couple of shared emotional looks, but without a passing familiarity with the first two movies, total comprehension will be as elusive as the titular Bourne.
Not that utter incomprehension could stop one from enjoying the visceral action. Paul Greengrass, the director of United 93, sets a new standard for action movies here. He’s a maestro with the hand-held camera; if there was a shot from a locked-down tripod somewhere in there, it’s well disguised. The constantly floating camera creates a world where nothing is stable, not even loyalty or identity.
Greengrass is the anti-Michael Bay, generating adrenaline with barely perceptible blurs instead of iconic commercial imagery. For example, the fight sequence in an empty Tangiers apartment is now the benchmark by which hand-to-hand combat scenes should be judged.
Bourne and his opponent trade bare-knuckled blows with constantly increasing speed and intensity. No Hollywood distractions or kung-fu wire work dilutes the combat. Its just raw, unremitting physicality, moving too rapidly to allow thought. There’s no pause for contemplating mortality, no room for wisecracks, just swift, lethal reactions. The flurry of blows is relentless and breathtaking, and the camera pushes into the action, locking the audience right into the heart of the combat. By the time the knife gets whipped out, the hands are flying faster than perception can track them. It’s an exquisitely choreographed blur that is a crystal clear shot of adrenaline.
It’s a style that might be off-putting to some, but Greengrass goes for it with total commitment and a sure hand. Would you rather watch a movie that shows you candy-colored nothing in exacting detail? Or a movie that shows you abstract, real-time blurs that hit like a ton of bricks?
“You start down this path, and where does it end?” asks one agent.
“It ends when we’ve won,” is the cold reply.
The Bourne Ultimatum is set in the modern cold war, with ultra-advanced technology being deployed against ill-defined opponents. Spies without clearly defined sides using bulldozers to fight fog banks. The film’s color palette – all muted blues and grey – hardly separates the good guys from the bad guys. This is the new paranoia, which is just like the old paranoia but with sharper graphics. GPS and RFID can track modern spies to a fraction of an inch, it seems, but the big picture just gets more muddled.
Jason Bourne, as a character, is a curious counterpart to John McClane from the Die Hard series. This is the era of the mortal super-hero and the nebulous enemies. Twenty years ago, Bourne would have been a single-minded American soldier fighting the Russians. Now he’s a free agent, no longer a patriotic American, fighting a secret government program that hovers between the corrupt and the flat-out illegal. Bourne’s character is a virtual ghost, and his enemies are just as non-corporeal.
Unlike the acerbic John McClane, Jason Bourne doesn’t have a personality. He is as grim, efficient, and grey as a snub-nosed pistol. His chase is supposedly about unlocking the answers to his past for some semblance of redemption. The film, though, is all about the chase, which is an unending quest for answers. When it’s all said and done, neither Jason Bourne nor the audience cares that much for the final answer. There’s hardly a flicker of emotion when Bourne finds out his true history; and screenwriter Tony Gilroy keeps the final revelations brief and unremarkable. Bourne shrugs off a moment of understanding, using it to escape from another no-win situation, and keeps on running.
Answers, as it turns out, aren’t nearly as much fun as the chase for them. Or, to paraphrase Springsteen: Baby, he was Bourne to run, indeed.
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