Bourne again

Wednesday, 15th August 2007

The Bourne Ultimatum, nationwide

You wouldn’t know it from the title, but The Bourne 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 Bourne 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 Bourne 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 Bourne 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 Bourne Supremacy, which he also directed, he relies on many of the techniques associated with cinéma verité, such as the use of hand-held cameras, and he has tried to shoehorn in a critique of the CIA’s 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 Bourne 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 Bourne 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.