Worthwhile example of style over substance

Rating: 7/10 (20 February 2013)

I heard the director, Paul Greengrass, being interviewed on the radio and he revealed that at lest five writers were used, including Tom Stoppard who isn't even credited. This tells you a lot. This film isn't about plot and it isn't about dialogue. The plot is a typical Hitchcockian McGuffin – i.e. it doesn't matter in the slightest. The great secret that Bourne is going to uncover isn't of the slightest interest in the end. There could have been a hundred other revelations as plausible as the one you are given. It just doesn't matter.
What does matter is the chase and the whole film is just a chase and very little else. However, it is the most exciting chase you are ever likely to see in this or any other film. It starts at a cracking pace and just keeps going right to the end. The whole thing is shot using hand-held cameras as far as I can see. Occasionally this is distracting as in an early brief expositional scene where as a viewer I was distracted and taken out of the film by the shakiness of the camera as it observed two characters talking. However this was the only point at which I was distracted.
Above all this film is a triumph of editing. The number of cuts are breathtaking and they are piled so deep and so quick that you can't help but be moved along by the kinetic energy on display. What might at first look like a directorial triumph is actually as much down to editing and music as anything else. The music, reminiscent of a pared-down Bernard Hermann, is surely a deliberate homage to that composer and it works brilliantly with the film to deliver an ever accelerating narrative. Bourne also makes a virtue of a stylistic device I have criticized in other reviews – the use of close shots of bodies in motion in order to give energy to a fight scene. The scene in which Bourne fights the CIA "asset" sent to kill him is shot in a fragmentary, blurred, partial manner which succeeds brilliantly in showing the desperate violence that such a fight must surely use. I don't think I've ever seen a more brilliant depiction of a one-to-one fight shot at close range.
Both a magnificent piece of film making and forgettable tosh then.