| Summary: |
He's a man on a mission, our Matt, and so too is his character, Jason Bourne, the near-mystically enhanced superspy who, after losing his memory and all sense of self, has come to realize that he has also lost part of his soul. For Bourne, who rises and rises again in this fantastically kinetic, propulsive film, resurrection is the name of the game, just as it is for franchises. This is the passion of Jason Bourne, with a bullet.
Their sights set far beyond the usual genre coordinates, the three Bourne movies drill into your psyche as well as into your body. They're unusually smart works of industrial entertainment, with action choreography that's as well considered as the direction. Doug Liman held the reins on the first movie, with Paul Greengrass taking over for the second and third installments. And while the two men take different approaches to similar material (the more formally bold Mr. Greengrass shatters movie space like glass), each embraces an ethos that's at odds with the no pain, no gain, no brain mind-set that characterizes too many such flicks. Namely remorse: in these movies, you don't just feel Bourne's hurt, you feel the hurt of everyone he kills.
Stripped of his identity, his country and love, Bourne is now very much a man alone, existentially and otherwise. Damon makes him haunted, brooding and dark. The light seems to have gone out in his eyes, and the skin stretches so tightly across his cantilevered cheekbones that you can see the outline of his skull, its macabre silhouette. He looks like death in more ways than one.
Death becomes the Bourne series, which, in contrast to most big-studio action movies, insists that we pay attention and respect to all the flying, back-flipping and failing bodies. There's no shortage of pop pleasure here, but the fun of these films never comes from watching men die.
The hard part is making them watch while also making them think about what exactly it is that they're watching. That's a bit of a trick, because forcing us to look at the unspeakable risks losing us, though in the Bourne series it has made for necessary surprises, like Ms. Potente's character's vomiting in the first movie because she has just seen a man fling himself out of a window to his death.
. . .
read all
|
