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The Bourne Ultimatum
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Under discussion:
The Bourne Ultimatum
(2007)
Bored by all the action? Although
The Bourne Identity
was one of my favourite films of the year—and several years afterwards—the second Bourne movie,
The Bourne Supremacy
, seemed just one chase after another. So when I heard that in the final episode, Jason Bourne, figures out what the CIA did to him and who he really is, I was set for a meaningful finale. But in
The Bourne Ultimatum
(2007), Jason is leaping off a building, crashing through a window, smashing dozens of cars (and emerging with a scratch), fighting countless bad guys with his bare hands (and emerging with scraped knuckles), and, oh no, climbing up to yet another roof top. My disappointment is that the franchise had a good story to run with yet decided on kinetic editing instead. I’m not saying that the editing or car chases or martial arts fights are poorly done. They are excellent. But a good story, which is difficult to find, will always top hyperactive film making, which is getting pretty easy to do now.
For example, there is one long sequence of countless fast edits that shows Jason running and leaping from one building to another, with the trigger-happy villains on his tail, but I suddenly realized that I and everyone else in the audience had no idea where Jason was trying to get to. To take a contrasting example, in the relatively slow-moving
Enemy at the Gates
, the suspense is tremendous when we see a
Stalingrad
sniper wanting to get to a safer location but knowing it risks a few seconds in the open. The epitome of
The Bourne Ultimatum’s
hyper-kinetic approach is this: The scene shifts from one city to another and there is loud boom. What!? We’re still looking at a placid overhead shot of the second city, so it couldn’t have been an explosion? A gunshot? No, it was an exploding
bass note on the sound track startling you into more pseudo-excitement.
Posted
Tuesday, October 09, 2007 1:31 AM
by
JimBell
| with
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