Bourne Again

Sunday night when Ben was over we all watched The Bourne Ultimatum. It's a continuation of the previous Bourne films, which Ben been told us are nothing like the books. The film has a lot of action sequences and Matt Damon does his impersonation of a Terminator robot throughout the movie as he keeps taking serious hits and yet still gets up and keeps on going. He's like Jack Bauer in that sense. There's a lot of action sequences, and stuff happens fast and and you have to really pay attention. The film has some negatives though. Bourne lives his life off the grid, but they don't explain how he got independently wealthy so that he can buy all this stuff using cash all the time. They also use the fast panning shaky camera shots a lot. I don't know who decided that shooting style was all trendy, but they need to have some sense smacked into them (in case it's not obvious, I'm not a fan of that particular style of filming). Seriously, are they saving that much in the budget by not having a stabilizer for the camera? Splurge a little people! The other thing that irked me some was there's a lot of "I knew you knew I knew that, so I did this" type of stuff going on. I don't mind anticipating someone's actions, but anticipating the fact that someone will anticipate an action and then doing something that counters that bothers me since you're relying too much on the person doing the anticipation to not be an idiot. I mean let's face facts, some of these folks are government employees, they're not all going to be the sharpest tools in the shed. The other thing that kind of bothered me is that it's really obvious sometimes when they're using a stunt double. You'll see Bourne driving a motorcycle and the scene will deliberately not show anything higher than his waist. That's to be expected in a film with this many action sequences, but it was still distracting at times.

Overall if you like straight up action flicks with lots of shooting, stuff blowing up and car chases, you might like this since there's always one of those things going on in this film. I will say I liked the first Bourne film (Bourne Identity) a lot, and I personally don't think either of the follow on films have lived up to that first film.