I like the Jason Bourne movies because they’re gritty and realistic (kinda)1 and Matt Damon is much better as a CIA assassin than I thought he would be. When I first saw the preview for The Bourne Identity I was so-so with it, but in the years following that first knock-out punch I’ve been hooked like a zombie on fresh, delicious human brains. The two films so far have been great, but there are a few things I’m not excited about with this third one.
1) Damon has said no more Bourne films after this one.
I understand what he’s doing here. He wants to be identified with something else besides Jason Bourne2, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
2) The amazingly cool Brian Cox is gone.
I love Brian Cox. He’s one of the great character actors of his generation and seeing his character Abbott kill himself in The Bourne Supremacy was heartbreaking for me. I was very disappointed when he turned out to be a bad guy because up until that moment that he stabbed his lackey he was just a great amoral character.
3) More shaky camera fight scenes.
One of my big criticisms between the first and second films was the way hand-to-hand combat scenes were filmed. Doug Liman filmed the scene in Bourne’s Paris apartment from about 10 feet back, allowing you to see what was going on with the knife/pen fighting. Paul Greengrass shot the fight scene inside of the house in Germany way too close to the action and with far too many edits for my taste. French director Jean-Luc Godard3 said “Every edit is a lie,” and it’s true. I would have preferred a more continuous feel to the combat than a shaky pile up of visuals.
4) No more Franka Potente.
Unless some miracle happened in that Indian river, Marie’s not coming back. That’s too bad.
And unless there’s a huge plot change, this is how it will all go down — the CIA will find Bourne somewhere and try to dispose of him. Bourne will rely on his training and smarts and will outwit all of them and overcome his adversaries. In the end he will be more paranoid than ever.
I’m sure it will be good, though. We’ll see.
- If you can say anything about these movies it’s that they reignited the James Bond franchise. Daniel Craig is no Pierce Brosnan in Casino Royale. He’s one mean SOB. [↩]
- Maybe he shouldn’t do any more of the Ocean’s movies then, either. [↩]
- If you don’t know him, Godard was one of the most influential members of the French New Wave movement in film. The New Wavers experimented radically with editing, visual style, and narrative, and the movement has been claimed to influence many movies, from Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde all the way to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Wes Andersen’s The Royal Tenenbaums. [↩]
