Bourne again
Toby Young The Bourne Ultimatum 12A, nationwide Whatever happened to the good, honest practice of sticking numerals after a sequel's title to indicate what number it was in the series? I grew up in the days of Jaws 2, Superman III and Police Academy 7 and, whatever the shortcomings of those pictures, at least you knew where you stood. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the worse the film in question was likely to be.
You wouldn't know it from the title, but The Boume Ultimatum is actually the third outing for Jason Bourne, the Bond-like character played by Matt Damon. The word 'ultimatum' is cunningly chosen in that it carries the suggestion that this may be the final part of the (God forgive me) Bourne trilogy, without in any way guaranteeing it. Unsuspecting punters may think, 'Well, I've seen the first two, so I might as well find out how the story ends' — but, if so, they're going to be disappointed. The Boume Ultimatum took over $70 million in the US in its opening weekend, proving that the law of diminishing returns doesn't apply to this particular sequel (at least not in financial terms). I fear the series will stretch on and on: The Boume Infinitum.
The reason Hollywood film-makers have abandoned the practice of calling sequels by their proper name is that they want audiences to think they're creative artists rather than shameless hacks — and The Boume Ultimatum is shot through with this yearning for respectability. Paul Greengrass, the director, is a Cambridge-educated documentary-maker who, among other things, ghosted Peter Wright's Spycatcher, and he brings a patina of left-wing high-mindedness to the proceedings. As with The Boume Supremacy, which he also directed, he relies on many of the techniques associated with cinema verite, such as the use of hand-held cameras, and he has tried to shoehorn in a critique of the CIAs more questionable activities — in this case, the policy of 'extraordinary renditions'. In Greengrass's hands, Jason Bourne has become an action hero with a conscience — a liberal with a licence to kill.
No doubt this will impress some critics, who will hail The Boume Ultimatum as an unusually 'intelligent' thriller, but, in truth, it is a boilerplate action picture with all the clichés of the genre in place. The hero is an apparently ordinary man who has to fall back on his quasi-military training in order to expose a sinister cabal of shadowy intelligence officers who, among other things, have murdered his girlfriend. True, none of Jason Bourne's antagonists meets his end by being impaled on a spike, but the film does contain a car chase in which the vehicles are travelling against the flow of traffic. (Yawn.) When the producers of The Boume Ultimatum claim to have 'reinvented' the genre — as they have done on numerous occasions — what they mean is that the car Bourne is driving in this scene is not an Aston Martin. In Hollywood, that passes for originality.
The plot, as you'd expect, is incapable of withstanding the slightest scrutiny. The film opens with the CIAs head of station in Madrid deciding to leak a story to the Guardian about the existence of a secret unit within the organisation called `Blackbriar'. Why he does this is never explained — a rather glaring omission, since the CIAs official policy for dealing with whistleblowers, apparently, is instant assassination. This will come as news to Bob Woodward, whose last three books have been largely based on sources within the intelligence community.
He may have to think about another career.
To be fair, in the first set piece of The Bourne Ultimatum — where the hero attempts to rendezvous with a Guardian journalist at Waterloo station — Greengrass takes every opportunity to remind us just what a resourceful action hero Jason Bourne is, outwitting his CIA opponents at every turn. Greengrass also makes effective use of the standard action-movie trope of introducing an additional threat into an already life-threatening situation. Thus, not only does Bourne have to contend with a seemingly numberless team of intelligence operatives fanning out across the station, but he also has to keep an eye open for the deadly assassin lurking in the rafters.
Unfortunately, this set piece is then duplicated, more or less shot-for-shot, three times in the course of the film Admittedly, the locations change — in true Bond style, Bourne flits from one exotic locale to another — but the key elements remain intact: the CIA goons, the assassin in the rafters. I suppose I shouldn't complain that the third film in a franchise essentially consists of the same scene repeated four times, but I did feel a little short-changed. Couldn't Greengrass have included a scene in a casino in which Bourne meets his chief antagonist at a card table? If he'd set it in Atlantic City, rather than Monte Carlo, he could have boasted of having completely reimagined the espionage thriller.
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