The Studio as the CIA

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2002)

Spoilers herein.
Here we have another film ruined by conservative studio executives worried about engineering their `take no chances' summer blockbuster. After an entire year of countless arguments, delays, rewrites, reshoots and audience tests, we have as flat and unimaginative a film that Hollywood can produce. This is precisely the stuff we see in this story and countless other CIA-centric plots: the man in the field (Liman) has talent and intuition, but the company (here Universal) thinks it knows better. It throws its power around and thwarts every speck of cleverness. Death and failure result.
It was set up to be quite clever: Ludlum's innovation was in recasting the airport thriller as a fractionated narrative told from many perspectives. The protagonist, whose knowledge the reader usually shares, is the least knowledgeable of all. Clancy has since wrapped this style in war gizmos, and Grisham in legal technicalities. Altman brought this notion to film; Tarantino styled it; Liman's evolution (in `Go') was to root the narrative confusion in the angst of discovery which brings us right back to the intent of Ludlum.
Okay, you have to begin with a dope as the lead because of the economics of the situation -- that was dictated by Universal and golden inner circle of decisionmakers. The last time we had such a stretch between the intellect of the actor and character in a summer movie was when Denise Richards played a nuclear scientist in `The World Is Not Enough.' Matt rivals Raquel Welch in the dumb department. But sobeit.
But see who else Liman assembled: for the girl, he collected Potente who all movielovers know from `Run Lola Run.' That was a breakthrough experiment in parallel narratives with the same intent as `Go,' but an orthogonal approach. No serious moviegoer cannot understand that as backstory to this. Make the `company man' be Chris Cooper, someone whose role here is exactly between his Sheriff Deeds of `Lone Star' and Col Fitts of `American Beauty,' both characters works of art.
Make the second love interest (presumably established for the continuations of the franchise) Julia Stiles. She is pretty, athletic and currently inexpensive. Her three Shakespearean film experiments are unacknowledged in their adventure in redefining the narration of the master. (Ophelia as film student!)
The magic in a project like this is in the editing and shooting footage to appear part of the editing. For instance, there needs to be a lot of handheld work, and this needs to be jiggly in a selfaware fashion. As taught in film school, the rhythm of the shakes should match the rhythm of the fast cuts. So we got a director of photography who worked with Woo and knows how to do this. Any competent editor would do, but Liman wanted an abstract stance (like his other two projects). Pulling that off with such a nervous camera requires insight, so we get an editor that has slogged through the intellectual challenges of Terrence Malick on his massive visual meditation on war.
Then the trouble begins. In the most ironic of developments, the Studio forced all sorts of safe formulae on the project. Gone is the narrative folding of Ludlum and Liman. Gone is the abstract camera: all is framed in those stock `computer screen' images where a shot of Berlin has a text overlay that types out the name with the accompanying clack of keys. Added is all sorts of bumpf techno tracking stuff that was never part of the story (or the real CIA) but sold well in `Spy Games' and `Behind Enemy Lines.' Gone is all the miniconspiracy of Stiles' character (`too complicated for kids'). Gone is the detective story.
Gone is any chance for us to like what we see.