Junior Bourne

Rating: 6/10 (10 November 2008)

The Bourne series appears to have rejuvenated the whole action-movie genre (even infecting the Bond franchise), in my opinion mostly for the better, with white-knuckle-ride thrills, conviction acting and contemporary settings now the norm where once there was Willis / Schwarzenegger cartoon excess. I know which I prefer as I say. This kidnap thriller certainly borrows heavily from the Bourne template, (not to mention Charles Bronson's "Death Wish", from an earlier era and even recent French thriller "Tell No One") with Liam Neeson metamorphosing from a seemingly ordinary average doting father into a driven, clinical but of course resourceful killing machine to rescue his teenage daughter from Algerian abductors in Paris. The film did though for me take a little too long to get going and suffers somewhat from too much sentimentality (of all things) particularly in the mawkish scenes between Neeson, his estranged wife, now a rich-man's plaything and their spoilt 17 year-old daughter. Disbelief suitably suspended though, Neeson incredibly tracks her down pretty much from scratch to a girl-trafficking syndicate where drugged-up teenagers are bid for in an eerily abhorrent "auction" by respectable-seeming businessmen, his character unsurprisingly racking up car-wrecks and body-count a-plenty. "The Searchers" it isn't and Neeson basically has to carry the film as he's by far the biggest name on board here but he certainly convinces as the expert retired intelligence operative, who snaps back into the groove under extreme provocation. The rest of the acting's nothing to write home about however and I feel the film could have benefited with better support and also by building up the Mr Big character a bit more as Neeson's nemesis. I also felt some of the action sequences were tricky to follow and fully engage with as the backgrounds were often unnecessarily dark and afflicted by a sort of staccato, stop-start camera style. The best action sequences in "The Bourne Ultimatum", by contrast flow naturally in a sort of heightened real-time and often in broad daylight. For all its plagiarism however and other defects I've mentioned above, this was still a watchable almost-all-action movie for a Saturday night.