My Ultimatum: Don't Ever Make Me Watch a Paul-Greengrass-Directed Film Again!

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2007)

I do like Matt Damon in most of his films, and as the lead actor in the three Bourne Films. The supporting actors are uniformly fine. The music is also fine, although I did get just a bit tired of the same themes repeated in all three movies... And the "new" cover of Moby's "Extreme Ways" theme at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum is definitely inferior to the original. Unlike the original, the vocalist (hard to believe it's really Moby) cannot hit or hold a correct note pitch, ever. Why does Hollywood always try to "improve" things? If it ain't broke, guys, leave it be!
But here's my big, related, question: What did poor Doug Liman do to anger Universal so much as to drop him, after The Bourne Identity, in favor of Paul Greengrass as Director? This move was, in my opinion, a horribly big mistake. Others have pointed out Greengrass' gratuitous "camera-shake" style of "creating energy". For example, just try to watch his "Bloody Sunday"; it's just bloody awful! Greengass' style just creates motion sickness for me.
The Bourne Identity, directed by Limon, has great energy; he did it just right. But Supremacy and Ultimatum went right over the pseudo-documentary, camera-jiggling, jangling-noise, blurry-take edge into pools of deep nausea.
More aggravation: The sound mix, especially during the protracted, over-long Tangier chase-and-fight scene, contains bits and bites of "vendor shouting" repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Nothing makes me more angry than this lazy, unprofessional approach to "movie-craft," or rather lack of it. Anyone with any sense of professionalism could have avoided this; these repeated sounds, once noted, become extremely intrusive.
Notice: This ends my watching anything directed by Greengrass, forever.
Watching the Bonus Features just made me even more angry. Watching them makes it obvious that the amount of equipment and the number of people have grown, for this third-in-the-trilogy film, to absurd proportions. For example: A traveling horde of movie-making people and tons of equipment transported from London to Paris via the Eurostar train produced a final Paris sequence so short, in the final cut, that we know it was merely a fine but useless junket for them, a gratuitous expense representing the worst kind of waste imaginable.
The "Bourne Franchise," as the director and others like to call it, became a bloated pork-pig beyond their wildest, most greedy desires. Usually, success breeds success, but The Bourne Ultimatum became a poor, overdone failure as the crew partied all over Europe and North Africa.
Six out of ten. I would have bought the DVD, just to have all three, but they'll never see my money now.