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Rating: 4 stars

All movies seen on 12/10/2007

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The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Directed by Paul Greengrass

Action

Most recently watched by VicnaLobster, sleestakk, sensoria, CaptainBigTime, schofizzy, jenerator

Overview

A CIA operation to purchase classified Russian documents is blown by a rival agent, who then shows up in the sleepy seaside village where Bourne and Marie have been living. The pair run for their lives and Bourne, who promised retaliation should anyone from his former life attempt contact, is forced to once again take up his life as a trained assassin to survive.

Rated PG-13 | Length 108 minutes

Actors

Matt Damon | Franka Potente | Brian Cox | Julia Stiles | Karl Urban | Gabriel Mann | Joan Allen | Marton Csokas | Tom Gallop | John Bedford Lloyd | Ethan Sandler | Michelle Monaghan | Karel Roden | Tomas Arana | Oksana Akinshina | Yevgeni Sitokhin | Marina Weis | Tim Griffin | Sean Smith | Maxim Kovalevski | Patrick Crowley | Jon Collin Barclay | Sam Brown | Shane Sinutko | Barnaby Smith | Dominique Chiout | Wanja Mues | Aleksey Shmarinov | Stephan Wolf-Schönburg | Olov Ludwig | Keshav Nadkarni | Violetta Gräfin Tarnowska Bronner | Alexey Medvedev | Aleksandr Dubina | Aleksandr Boev | Claudio Maniscalco | Manfred Witt | Aleksey Trotsenko | Victoria Unikel | Oksana Semenova | Vitaly Abdulov | Dirk Schoedon | Ivan Shvedoff | Denis Burgazliev | Nick Wilder | Chris Cooper

Viewing History (seen 2 times)

Viewing Notes

This originally appeared as a DVD review for PopSyndicate.com in 2007.

Bourne is back for blood.

The Bourne Trilogy of films is something remarkable in action filmdom. For whatever reason, studios think that plot holes can be filled with giant explosions, a car chase, sex or a combination of all three. The Bourne films have explosions, car chases and the occasional sex, but it has what most others are missing: subtlety and smarts.

The Bourne Ultimatum picks up in Moscow at the end of the The Bourne Supremacy after Bourne has just killed his assassin, Kirill. A wounded Bourne is forced to escape from Moscow so that he can continue towards his goal: take down Project Treadstone, the black ops CIA project that created him. His first hope is Simon Ross, a journalist working to expose Bourne and Treadstone, as well as its successor Blackbriar. The CIA has him assassinated before he can expose information from a Blackbriar operative, but Bourne manages to steal his notes and track down the operative with the help of Nicky who makes a snap decision to turn coat. The two track down Ross’ source, but he’s also assasinated. Again, Bourne escapes with a piece of information: the location of a CIA substation in New York City that Blackbriar is working from. Pamela Landy, who tracked Bourne in The Bourne Supremacy, is tasked to help Blackbriar track him down, but she doesn’t agree with their brutal methods so she exposes the location of the Project Treadstone training facility to Bourne, who must then deal with the pain of the truth that lies inside.

Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity will always be my favorite of the three because it was unexpectedly so damn good. I didn’t dislike The Bourne Supremacy, which saw Liman opt out and Paul Greengrass take over, but it didn’t click with me like Identity. Greengrass kept most of Liman’s stylistic choices, but chose to go gritty with the fights, pulling cameras in close to focus on the weight where Liman pulled back to admire the beautiful ballet of it all. Greengrass maintains that style in Ultimatum unfortunately, but he did accomplish something that Liman never did: maintain tension. From the opening minutes through the end, Greengrass and Bourne Trilogy smart scripter Tony Gilroy will have you edge-of-seat and frayed at both ends wondering what’s going to happen next.

Really, you only need the film, but frustratingly, this is a clear first issue of The Bourne Ultimatum, meaning I have absolutely no doubt that it will keep tradition with the other two Bourne films and others by releasing this slim edition now but release a special edition sometime in 2008. There are special features, but what’s there is slim and feels unfinished. The director’s commentary is the only standard issue feature; the rest are featurettes all focusing on putting together the amazing action sequences that, in reality, could have been one 30-minute featurette.

Straight ahead action films aren’t common faire much anymore outside the occasional martial arts flick. The genre was played out sometime in the Nineties with bad acting, bad technology and over the top spectacles. Something smart, yet manly, has been a rarity, but the Bourne films, while remarkably different from the Robert Ludlum source material, have nonetheless managed to restore some modicum of respect to the genre. I don’t see that continuing as a trend.

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