stillbourne

Rating: 3/10 (29 July 2007)

Visually incoherent storytelling of the basest sort. Stuck with an action movie script that looks like it was put together in shop class, Paul Greengrass is then hampered by the dullest possible supporting cast and a mandate to pander. The result is like an 80s Bruce Willis movie, only blurry and less amusing.
All three of these Bourne movies fail on just about every level. The action scenes, while for the most part live-action, are trendily overcut and blown out. They end up containing all the visual appeal of weak pc graphics. At least briefly there was a human interest story; now, Damon's the terminator, there's no love, and there's not enough action to make it anything but a bore. The crude device of the turncoat spook boss, and the crutch of the hit man's existential quest: these are as old as spy movies, old and, yes, moldy. This plot is no more extensive than the introductory chapter of a first person shooter game. Less so, in fact. I know more about Raccoon City than I know about this less realized world.
Once again, the occasionally excellent Matt Damon is given nothing to do but run up and down stairs, point a gun, and not smile. It's too bad, and indicative of what else is wrong with most of this type of movie: there's nobody to care about. I liked Franka Potente, but that was for her own virtues, not because of any value these movies sought out in her. And they killed her at the top of the second act. So with ULTIMATUM we yet again enter Bourne's world on the run, are given a minimum of information related to the story and no personal information whatsoever, except what's rehashed from the previous films. There is no new information in this one except the empty scene with Albert Finney at the end, a scene that lacks every sort of power anyway. What a waste; what an unsurprising letdown.
Greengrass may be possessed of more film-making knowledge than anybody right now; his work on "Bloody Sunday" and "United 93" stands as superior by any measure. And he does something here that shows remarkable savvy: after each frantically edited fight scene, he pauses the action as a cue for the target audience to applaud. This is generalship and not to be taken lightly. To achieve a sense of claustrophobia he also limits himself to about four shots through the whole thing: over the shoulder close-up on one eye is his favorite. Technically, except for an annoying reliance on a shaky hand-held camera, he is very good. His handicaps here, especially the soon-to-be-dated visuals and the witless screenplay, relegate BOURNE to one-summer obscurity. Nobody will remember this moment. Probably this movie will make lots of money from people who like the way video games look, and allow Greengrass and Damon to make more personal films unhampered. That would be the only possible positive result of "Bourne Ultimatum."