Review Of “The Bourne Ultimatum”
That The Bourne Ultimatum made the most money at the box office this sweltering August weekend is little surprise. What is stunning to me is the makeup of the crowd.
The Film Babe and I went to an afternoon showing on the flick’s first day in theaters. In the crowd were a bunch of literary types rarely seen in testosterone-laden action movies. The head of the library and his spouse were there. The couple that owns Louisville’s leading indie bookstore were there. And a number of other professionals, educators and aesthetes — serious people — the kind you’d never see at, say, a Die Hard flick.
I guess these folks had been hooked in by the book series which is filled not only with action but plausible if scary political intrigue.
Ah, yes, the CIA — can’t live with them, can’t live without them. If only we, as citizens knew which. We know, of course, that they’d done something to the guy played by Matt Damon. We know him as Jason Bourne. But neither he nor we are exactly sure his real identity until this final installment.
I shan’t spoil the flick, because it is well worth seeing. Boffo action adventure entertainment. The best, in fact, that I can recall. This is taut film making at its best. The fight scenes, the shoot-em-ups, the chases are all of the highest quality. And, until they spin a might out of control at the end, almost believable. Almost.
So you’ve got your Matt Damon on the loose. You’ve got your rogue CIA command operative David Straithairn on his ass. He’d like to terminate Mr. Damon with extreme prejudice at his very earliest opportunity. And Joan Allen and Julia Stiles, also with the Company, sympathetic to our boy who is slippin’ and slidin’ around chic European locales.
The question the film raised for me is how realistic that CIA command center portrayed really is? Do they have the capability to link into surveillance cameras anywhere in the world? Can they have trained assassins on site within minutes? Who knows?
But I will share my long held theories about such paranoia when considering our government’s actions. Whatever farfetched, cockamamie Big Brotherish scheme you might conjure up, whatever over-the-top insinuation into private people’s lives you might have nightmares about, what the United States government is doing in the name of national security, truth, justice and the American way is way worse.
Okay enough political polemic. The Bourne Ultimatum is action adventure cinema of the highest sort. It works for literary types. It works for teenaged boys with a bounty of testosterone. It worked for me. And for the Film Babe, who liked it so much, she says she’ll go back if she can get Son of Film Babe to go with her.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
