A big zero

Rating: 1/10 (10 December 2012)

What a waste of time! And money! All those cars that exploded, motorcycles that were wrecked, devastation that was wrought, and all for nothing! This so-called 'film' is just an expensive computer game for mindless oafs. It has a flimsy pretext for a story to give it some vague semblance of purpose, but that is so confusingly communicated (much of it by the semi-audible mumblings of incompetent actors or sound men who have fallen asleep and been replaced by malfunctioning robots) that it might as well not exist. The script dialogue is vestigial, like the human appendix, and serves little useful purpose. It appears that by invoking the name of 'Bourne', it was hoped that this Big Nothing might make a quick buck before too many people realized how vacuous it really was, and that it is not based on a novel by Robert Ludlum and in fact is just a mindless meander through the void of purposeless violence and chase scenes that provide totally empty thrills. Needless to say, Jason Bourne does not appear in the film at all, and Matt Damon is glimpsed only in some photos. There is a line of dialogue amongst some sinister spy chiefs that says he has been discovered 'at large in Manhattan', but we learn no more, so perhaps there is some other film in production which will tell us about Matt in Manhattan. It is interesting, isn't it, that if you remove five letters from Manhattan you get Matt. This is clearly a code and indicates an international conspiracy at the very least, if not an inter-galactic one. (I want royalties for that idea.) The worried girl in the film is a barely recognisable Rachel Weisz. She spends a lot of time furrowing her brow. As she has little dialogue, she was clearly not challenged by the part. Edward Norton is in there, but which is he? Stacy Keach and even Albert Finney flash into view, but to no effect at all. They must have laughed up their sleeves as they collected their fees, hoping that their friends would never see the film and laugh at them for appearing at all in such a load of tosh. All those grim-faced people with guns. I think the audiences and viewers ought to be the ones to get grim-faced and demand their money back. It is difficult to believe that Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplays for the three real Bourne films and has now written this nonsensical spin off. What a steep decline, or shall I say, how low can you stoop! He did such a good job of scripting the feature film version of STATE OF PLAY (2009, see my review), and he has 'been around'. He also directed this mess, his third directorial effort. OK, so he or his camera crew framed some good shots of boats sailing amongst islands, but how about a story? It seems that Gilroy is only good at adaptations and that as soon as he tries coming up with a story of his own, forget it. Please, Gilroy, don't do this to us again. Stick to interpreting other people's material, don't try and invent stuff.