Bourne again

Wednesday, 15th August 2007

The Bourne Ultimatum, nationwide

The plot, as you’d expect, is incapable of withstanding the slightest scrutiny. The film opens with the CIA’s 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 CIA’s 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.