|
|
| Saturday, February 16, 2008 08:48 PM |
| On the Viewer: The Bourne Ultimatum |
 by Fëanor |
I remember reading and enjoying a good number of Robert Ludlum's Bourne books when I was younger, so I've been watching all the movies as they've been coming out. I thought the first one was decent, and the second one was even better, so I was excited to see the third one, The Bourne Ultimatum. Sadly, I found myself a bit disappointed by it.
It starts off well enough. A reporter finds a source who knows everything about Jason Bourne and the program he was a part of - Blackbriar. The reporter has already started writing a series of articles about Bourne; Bourne reads them and decides to track the guy down and see who he's talking to and what else he knows. Unfortunately, the reporter mentions Blackbriar on a cell phone call, it's overheard by the people who are constantly listening to all of our cell phone calls, and the CIA sends guys after him. Which sets up a tense and fantastic sequence during which Bourne and the CIA play a cat-and-mouse game with the reporter as the prize. It's a brilliantly directed and edited sequence wherein Bourne shows just how competent and well-trained he is. Unfortunately, he's outnumbered, the reporter freaks out, and things don't go his way. Still, he and the CIA both pick up clues that lead them toward the reporter's source, and the chase continues.
It's when Bourne arrives at the source's office that things start to go downhill for me. At this point, a new CIA official is now watching things play out in the situation room - a woman named Landy, who, thanks to previous dealings with Bourne, suspects there is more to the situation than she's been told, and that Bourne might not be as bad a guy as everyone's telling her he is. That'll be important later. At the source's office, Bourne takes out a couple more agents, and the guys in the situation room lose their video. So they call the office. In the middle of the night. After two guys have already fired weapons in there and Bourne is very likely still on the premises. And they actually get somebody on the phone: Nicky, who also knows Bourne from before. And in fact Bourne has a gun on her when she answers the phone. Noah Vosen, the "bad guy" in the situation room, does an identity challenge on Nicky to determine if she is under duress. She gives the code word for all clear. After she does this, Vosen trusts her and everything she says implicitly, despite the fact that she's speaking in a very odd manner, and when he asks her, about halfway through the conversation, if she's made contact with the two agents on site, she says, "They're unconscious but alive." And he takes this in stride.
I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. Just think about it: if you came into your office and found two guys with guns on the floor unconscious, and then somebody called you from the home office, wouldn't the first thing you said be about those two guys you found on the floor? And wouldn't you be saying this urgently and quietly in case the guy was still there? Nicky is obviously not acting the way someone in her situation should act. And yet the guys on the other end of the line do not pick this up at all and tell her, "Yeah, just hang out there, we'll talk to you later," and then never follow up with her, even when they discover that two people have left the office together and disappeared, and the only two people those could have been were Bourne and Nicky. In fact, they are so incompetent about handling Nicky that later on she's actually able to send orders to a government assassin. Also, when the assassin diverts from the path to his target in order to go and meet Nicky, the people in the situation room decide not to do anything about it, for no reason I can think of. Although they see what's happening and they're confused about it, they don't ask him what he's doing, and when he gets back on the path to his target, they forget all about it.
That stuff just seemed really ridiculous and hard to believe to me. I also found some of Landy's actions a little hard to believe. I mean, it seems to me from her perspective it should have made perfect sense to eliminate both a CIA higher-up who's leaking top secret information to the press, and a rogue brainwashed assassin who is trying to acquire said top secret information. Those sound like dangerous people!
Still, not everything she does is nonsensical. And there are a lot of great scenes in the movie - fantastic espionage, intrigue, action, and all that kind of stuff. It's also interesting that it tries to talk about important contemporary issues such as: should the government, in a time of war, be able to kidnap, torture, and kill people with impunity and without oversight? The film's answer is, of course, a resounding "no." In the real world, the jury is still out.
The film leaves things open for a sequel at the end, of course, and leaves us feeling that there's still more about Bourne's past that we haven't seen yet. And I'd certainly watch the next Bourne film. I just hope it's a little more believable than this one. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
