Awful Awful Awful

Rating: 1/10 (9 February 2005)

This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The camera was hand held and shot close throughout the entire movie. The resulting image was shaky and quite nauseating. Using all hand held shots works most of the time. When the shots are from one continuous viewpoint, and involve very few cuts, it can make you feel like you are part of the action. Not so in this movie.
Since the camera was always so close to the subject, you could never quite tell what was happening. A gun fired! But who was holding it? As well as the notorious floorboards shot in the car chase scenes. I don't know why the director thought throwing in a shot of Matt Damon's feet on the floorboards multiple times was a good idea, but they are there. Jason pushed the accelerator! The editing was terrible. In the action scenes, no shot was longer than 3 frames. In the calm scenes, no shot was longer than 15 frames. Why? Maybe cutting that often would have been okay if the camera hadn't been so shaky, the frame wasn't always so tight, or maybe if the director wasn't constantly violating the 180 degree rule in order to add more confusion to an already confusing mess.
The lighting was the worst I've seen in a long time. Simply because they didn't use any lights. I was praying for the nighttime scenes to end so I could see what was going on again. Of course, when I could see, I didn't want to because it made me want to puke from the camera shake.
The story was okay. Standard action fare. The story followed too many characters around for me to really care about any of them. All I really wanted was to see (or at least hear) Jason Bourne to knock everybody unconscious.
My advice is to see something else. Not some garbage that was obviously made by a high school amateur. How about James Bond?