This movie is hopped up on a speed and adrenaline cocktail. It’s pretty much non-stop action, with very little character development, minimal dialogue, and no Life Lessons.
You don’t watch this kind of movie because you want to sit around over lattes discussing the meaning of this camera angle or whether that object was a metaphor for the futility of human existence. You watch this kind of movie because you like testosterone and adrenaline, and you get a rush from watching action sequence after action sequence, and the good guy is Matt Damon, who’s kind of sweet to look at, with his squared off nose-profile and his regular guy chagrin-face.
There’s not much chagrin-face going on in Bourne, though. It’s all intensity and fierceness and fast camera angles that might give you motion-sickness, especially if you’ve eaten too much popcorn with fake movie butter.
Regarding Julia Stiles: I don’t know how much she got paid for this movie, but it probably came out to about a million dollars per word. Every time the camera looked at her, she looked back wordless and wide-eyed, like she had forgotten her lines, and the director just said, “Hey, we’ll use that! Don’t worry about the lines, JJ. It’s all good.”
Don’t watch this movie if you’re looking for the complexity of the Bourne novels; but if you love edge-of-your-seat action connected with the movie-Bourne character, the Bourne Ultimatum delivers.
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Dol and I saw BU over the Labor Day weekend. As you note, the action is non-stop, and over the top (no one walks or swims away from the incidents pictured, at least not in reality). If there is a message to the movie, it would be that our CIA is hopelessly incompetent of anything except killing. Perhaps we should raise the wall of separation between CIA and FBI a la Jamie Gorelick. Especially if we like fighting terrorists with unarmed & untrained civilians. Oh, wait, it's been tried.
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