No Brite Smile product placement

Rating: 6/10 (4 August 2007)

Just back from seeing 'The Bourne Ultimatum.' Which called to mind John Simon's famous quote about Ali McGraw: 'Her emotions ran the gamut from a to b...'
If the stars of this movie were paid by facial expressions used during the filming of 'The Bourne Ultimatum,' the producers either paid too much or made the movie for pennies. Matt Damon uses one grimace throughout, in fact all the actors, down to the smallest parts, are only called upon to grimace. When Bourne looks at a picture of his dead girlfriend, a picture in which she is smilinga smile amid the grimly grimaced grimaces, the audience in my theater, after enduring such A to B-dom, spontaneously hugged the persons to their left and right in relief. Rumor has it, that the producers attempted to get a Brite Smile product placement and when they failed, dictated a no smiles policy on screen.
The movie seems an homage to '24', with continuous use of technology rather than human interaction, and shouts of "form a secure perimeter..." between the Run Jason Run plot. Yes, an homage with the same fabled porous perimeters that drive so much of '24' s action. Never in the history of movies have more perimeters been demanded with less effect. It would have been a much more enjoyable movie experience if we all had adopted the 'form a secure perimeter' drinking game of hard core '24'-ers.
The story is a succession of chases, done with close ups so close that you wonder more about the actors' pores than their craft. Hmmm, what does Matt Damon use...a mild facial cleanser and an exfoliant? Does he wash his face every night? Dove? Keihl's face cream for men? I sat there and thought: kind of big pores for a movie star and Albert Finney's?..well, it's been a long time since the youthful smoothness of 'Tom Jones.' So we sit and munch our popcorn to the thumping soundtrack, and Jason runs at or away from us for hours, runs away from increasingly ludicrous numbers of CIA operatives sent to kill him and anyone he talks to. Frenetic action with all sorts of film school mannerisms: lots of overhead shots, lots of odd angles through elbows/over shoulders/through distorting glass, grainy film stock, purposeful out of focus shots to put the audience there, in the scene, grim faced and large pored with the actors.
And, of course the au courant deep loathing of the Beelzebub CIA, of the United States, the twins of complete immorality, incredibly invasive technology, porous perimeters, legions of mindless minions, tramplers of all human rights, and, always, at the dark heart of it all: conspirators with conspiracies within conspiracies.
I don't think I have seen an action movie recently involving anything to do with government that does not have an obligatory water-boarding scene, or hasn't worked 'rendition' into the script. These are now totems to prove the writers/producers/directors bona fides as speaking truth to power and moving the Big Lie along.
The ordering of a murder with a small American flag at the murder order-ers elbow is the kind of subtlety used to make sure you know what country lies at the belly of the beast.
Not nearly as good a movie as the first two Bournes but, absolutely worth seeing. Go to marvel at the adrenaline rush excitement the Director's skill creates hoping it will form a secure perimeter around plot holes big enough to swallow the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll.
Note to fellow action movie lovers: four stars for the number of scenes in which nine millimeters in two handed extended arm sweep rooms, houses, streets, offices. Four stars for honoring the tradition of at least one attractive female lead self dyeing and cutting off her hair with scissors to disguise herself and emerging as a butterfly from a caterpillar with a look that John Edwards pays $400 for.