The Bourne Ultimatum + summer movies.

"Summing up the first two films, Manohla Dargis (then at the Los Angeles Times) said that the drama of [The Bourne Identity] was existential (Who am I?), and the drama of [The Bourne Supremacy] was moral (What did I do?)," recalls David Denby in the New Yorker. "I would say that the drama of [The Bourne Ultimatum] is redemptive: How can I escape what I am?... The material is formulaic, but, of all the current action franchises, this one is the most enjoyable."

"If they could bottle what gives The Bourne Ultimatum its rush, it would probably be illegal," gushes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "The third and purportedly final installment in the mountingly exciting series is a pounding, pulsating thriller that provides an almost constant adrenaline surge for nearly two hours."

"Robert Ludlum died six years ago, but that has done nothing to slow the release of books published under the name of the actor-turned-novelist who specialized in thrillers built on a foundation of paranoia," writes Richard Sandomir in the New York Times. "The business is deployed now as a kind of film studio, presenting books completed by others or new ones written using his name."

Updates, 7/31: "The Bourne Ultimatum opens at a dead sprint, and doesn't much slow down; even its quiet, contemplative moments have a sense of unease and their own careening forward momentum," writes Brent Simon for Screen Daily. "Anchoring the movie in resolute fashion, [Matt] Damon delivers another intense performance, absorbing information at a high rate of speed and translating that into both rapid analysis and breathless action. The combination of massive raw intelligence and swallowed grief and self-torture that inform Bourne is captured as much in Damon's clenched jaw and hard-set eyes as any dialogue (after all, who is left for Bourne to really open up to?), and he feels every bit the chariot driver here."

"The punches are quick, brutal, and relentless," grants Paul Schrodt at Slant. "In one memorable set piece, Bourne and another vacant-eyed secret agent rip each other apart inside a Tangiers apartment, stripping away the home's décor as the shots literally shatter into tiny fragments. It may be the most breathless action sequence of the year, but, put together, the film's stunts seem as empty as Bourne's head - a globetrotting exercise in urban combat punctuated with control-room zingers like 'Sir, he drove off the roof!'... If the film's glowing early reviews are any indication, what [Paul] Greengrass lacks in soul he more than makes up for in artifice."

A "chase movie of breathtaking purity," declares Jürgen Fauth. It "makes the 'seriousness' of Casino Royale look sentimental. Speaking of Bond: The Bourne Ultimatum shows just how slack and self-satisfied the much-praised Casino Royale really was. Bond has the glossier locations, juicier women and flashier cars, but in a fight, Bourne would slit 007's throat and make off with the suitcase nuke before Bond had time to put down his martini."

In the Voice, Nathan Lee draws the comparison as well: "[W]here Bond movies are juiced by a conflict of egos, the Bourne adventures are all about competing intelligence systems - as manifested through action set-pieces. In the case of Ultimatum, make that flabbergasting, mind-boggling, next-level action set-pieces." And get this: "This is director Paul Greengrass's second Bourne picture after Supremacy, but it's also a stealth sequel to his last film, United 93."

Updates, 8/1: "This trim, efficient, preposterously entertaining popcorn picture isn't just a model of craftsmanship, it's also a rousing rebuke to the idiotically widespread notion that turning off your brain is a requirement for enjoying an action movie," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "This is whip-smart genre filmmaking with a seething political undercurrent keyed directly into the here and now. Who says blockbusters can't be art?"

But in the L Magazine, Benjamin Strong asks, "How did the thinking man's blockbuster get here?" For him, Ultimatum is just "Bruckheimer-Bay gunplay with prestige acting."

With Supremacy, "Greengrass stayed true to his leftish politics in the big-budget potboiler, but he grafted them on awkwardly and strayed from the taut action, concise characterizations, and nuanced relationships of the first film in the franchise, Doug Lyman's The Bourne Identity," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "He's learned a lot since then, however. His United 93 was one of the best films of 2006. And his The Bourne Ultimatum is the best action film so far this summer." Also: "Matt Damon has argued that his Jason Bourne has supplanted James Bond as the hero of our time. 'Bond is an imperialist and a misogynist,' Damon said, sounding not a little like his mentor, lefty historian Howard Zinn. 'Bourne's not the government. The government is after him... He's the opposite of James Bond.'... Action heroes aren't the only ones confronting the institutions and ideals they always believed in. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the boy wizard contends not just with puberty but also with the realization that the he and hierarchy at the Ministry of Magic might not be on the same page.... Maybe the fundamentalist groups demanding a ban on JK Rowling's novels are onto something. Harry might not be seducing kids into the black arts, but he sure is suggesting that they challenge authority. Those same religious groups are going to be even more pissed off at Chris Weitz's upcoming adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first volume in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy."

Updates, 8/2: "Everything but the enchanted kitchen sink shows up in the sprawling fairy tale Stardust," writes Vareity's John Anderson, "including evil witches, airborne pirate ships, double-parked unicorns and Robert De Niro as a cross-dressing sea captain. Sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humor, fairly adult jokes and some well-known faces acting very silly, this adventure story should have particular appeal to fans of The Princess Bride, but in any event will never be mistaken for a strictly-for-kids movie."

"Brett Ratner, The Popcorn King" is the title of Scott Foundas's cover story in this week's LA Weekly, though as it opens, it's all about Chris Tucker. It's "language - specifically, the acrobatic juggling of it - that has established Tucker as the most verbally dexterous screen comic since the young Eddie Murphy. On the Rush Hour 3 set, he rarely says a line the same way twice, and the more he improvises, the better things tend to get.... Meanwhile, despite a decade of actively working in Hollywood, [Jackie] Chan's English remains spotty." As for the movie, it's costing around $120 million, so New Line seems a little nervous. "Ultimately, the person most responsible for making sure people see and like Rush Hour 3 is the director whose seven feature films have generated more than $1 billion in global ticket sales, putting him in the elite company of Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, M Night Shyamalan and a select few others who have reached that milestone before their 40th birthdays.... [T]he curious thing about Ratner is the uniquely vicious tenor of the criticism he engenders, as if he didn't deserve his success and the perks that come with it; as if to be seen in the same room with Paris Hilton were an unforgivable sin; as if, quite frankly, he were enjoying his life too much."

Also in the LAW, Ella Taylor on this week's popcorner: "Greengrass treats us to an escalating collection of exquisitely choreographed car chases, blowups and - Bourne being the do-it-yourself, one-man-against-the-system fellow that he is - hand-to-hand combat and the use of common electric fans as nifty decoys. With every twist of the final pileup on the streets of Manhattan - a sequence of unbelievable technical chutzpah - the man next to me rose in his seat, grunted happily and gently resettled. In other words, The Bourne Ultimatum is fully critic-proof."

"As pointed an indictment of Bush's War is Ultimatum's depiction of the metastasizing of the covert Bush-era intelligence apparatus," notes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. This batch of CIA operatives "operate in a netherworld where contract assassins are code-named 'assets' and the combatants of power joust among the nameless, faceless masses. 'You start down this path and where does it end?' asks agent Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, reprising her role from Supremacy). 'It ends when we've won,' retorts [Noah] Vosen [David Strathairn]. That themes this weighty could fit within the confines of what is essentially an extended adrenaline rush bears continuing testament to the talent of director Paul Greengrass, who can amass a mountain of import by training his handheld camera on a single sidelong glance."

But for Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, "There's nothing remotely political about the exploits of Jason Bourne; his god-like ability to eradicate imminent danger is so far removed from our sense of reality that those nasty CIA folks chasing after him look like MacGuffins in suits."

"Much is being made of the large-scale, smash-'em-up Big Apple climax, for which the production managed to shut down Manhattan's Seventh Avenue," notes Drew Lazor in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But for the money, it doesn't get much better - or more Bourne - than the utterly enjoyable gambit set in Tangier, where the hero tears through streets on a dirtbike, hops from roof to roof and engages in one hell of a washroom scuffle with silent operative Desh (Joey Ansah)."

"It's not often that nearly 2,000 people burst into spontaneous applause at the sight of four men being brutally pulverised on the backstairs of Waterloo station," reports Kevin Maher in the Times of London. "But such was the euphoria created by a recent West End screening of Paul Greengrass's shamelessly propulsive The Bourne Ultimatum that those gathered, all well-heeled culturati, could not help but whoop loudly with delight when the first-act pursuit of the action-man protagonist Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) culminated in an unforgettably visceral bout of five-way fisticuffs in the bowels of the station."

Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door, Andrew Dignan: "The thing fucking cooks; even when it's unclear what direction we're heading in there's no downtime to get worked up over it. Plus (and this is a big one) it certainly compares favorable to most of the summer's big event films."

Cinematical's James Rocchi finds "a blunt metaphor for what's happening in the real world, as troops have tours of duty extended in Iraq, and soldiers and civilians both suffer and die so that the dignity of our leaders might be maintained, so that all the death and pain that's come before won't be seen as a failure or an embarrassment for the people who demanded it. But these thoughts come to you later on; in the theater, The Bourne Ultimatum holds you in a fierce grip that gleams with the sheen of sweat and effort, dragging you across the globe from hazy winter shades to sun-drenched streets."

"What may disappoint viewers is that all of this is familiar stuff if you've already seen the previous films," writes Jeremiah Kipp at the House Next Door. "Granted, anyone interested in checking out this latest entry will want some more of the same, but even the Harry Potter series has been able to find ways of breathing fresh life into its formulaic trappings through the strength of its great cast of character actors and imaginative directors."

"[T]he movies, even more than the Ludlum books (which long ago I consumed with equal velocity and voraciousness), are themselves machines: beautifully constructed, splendid to behold," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "And in this third and possibly final episode... the series has come close to attaining a kinetic perfection. If Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down was the all-war war movie - nearly two hours of nonstop battles - The Bourne Ultimatum is the all-action action movie. A pounding of the eyes and ears (John Powell's score is all urgent percussion), the movie is one continuous, exhausting, exhilarating chase."

"Six years after their last adventure, Lee and Carter, one of the movies' oddest crime-fighting tandems, are slowing down a bit in Rush Hour 3," writes Variety's Robert Koehler. "Though late summer timing is just right for the franchise, Rush Hour 3 opens just a week after The Bourne Ultimatum, and while auds may take some relief in the bouncy comic rapport between Chan and Chris Tucker, they're bound to find the action mild if not downright tame by comparison."

Back to Bourne: "I found United 93 almost too skillful for its own good, surer of how to wring a cold sweat from its audience than of what it wanted to say," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But when the source material is a Robert Ludlum spy thriller rather than one of the worst days in our country's history, that level of directorial calculation is more than welcome." And this is nice: "He may not be able to remember his own name, but he can't forget Marie (and given that she was played by Franka Potente, possibly the coolest moll in the history of spy thrillers, who can blame him?)."

"The Bourne Supremacy was a passable time-waster, but three years later I can't remember anything about it, aside from wondering why the world's dullest spy was getting his own franchise," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Fortunately, The Bourne Ultimatum is an improvement on its predecessor - more concerned with the soothing sounds of screeching metal than the irritating chirping of one vacant character to another."

Updates, 8/3: "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," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "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. It's easy to make people watch — just blow up a car, slit someone's throat. The hard part is making them watch while also making them think about what exactly it is that they're watching."

"Jason Bourne emerges as the kind of troubled but resolute hero we most need these days, a figure who insists on peering through the murk rather than letting it block the truth," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Jason Bourne, clawing his way out of madness, still has a conscience even though he has lost most of his mind. The Bourne Ultimatum is a great action movie, exhilarating and neatly crafted, the kind of picture that will still look good 20 or 30 years from now. And while it isn't a cheerful picture, I found it to be an oddly comforting one, perhaps more so than its two predecessors."

"[T]he profusion of frantic shots never feels like showboating, and the closeness never feels claustrophobic," writes Carina Chocano. "This is also saying something, considering how thoroughly action films have used similar techniques to come out resembling steroidal video games. Greengrass is not out to 'entertain' in the dismal, specious sense. He can be trusted to never dangle a shiny Tom Cruise object in front of us and expect us to sit back in brain-dead amazement as it flies across a green screen just out of singe range of an exploding CGI fireball. Greengrass's camera may scurry and dart like a rabbit trapped in a mall, but he keeps the tone grounded, the effects in-camera and the acting low-key and real."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Sheigh Crabtree talks with stunt coordinator Dan Bradley who, speaking from experience with all these flicks, is sure Bourne could beat the shit out of Indiana Jones, James Bond and Spider-Man.

A "clear winner in the three-peat paradigm," blogs Bill Gibron at PopMatters.

"Frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds the mediocre, The Bourne Ultimatum does have a few nice touches," allows Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "But I reached my pain threshold halfway through the opening credits, so the rest was pure hell."

"A fairy tale based on Neil Gaiman's four-part DC Comics book from 1997, Stardust is an ambitious high-concept adventure which is one of the few non-sequels, non-toy or non-TV adaptations to arrive in theatres this summer," writes Mike Goodridge. "British director Matthew Vaughn has certainly crafted an energetic, handsome film, but it's a tough sell. On the one hand, it's a romance for teenage girls with a handsome leading man in Charlie Cox and a feisty lead female character played by Claire Danes; on the other hand, it's a comic adventure for nerdy comic-loving teenage boys along the lines of classic Gilliam like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Whether the girls will respond to the adventure and the boys to the romance is questionable... Likewise it's not a sure thing for smaller children, who prefer the more simple, less smart-ass mythology of Narnia, while adults might think it looks too childish to commit to sans kids."

Also at Screen Daily: "No matter how fast Chris Tucker shoots his mouth or Jackie Chan flashes his fists, they can't recapture the charm of the original Rush Hour in this third installment," writes Tim Grierson, who also reviews Underdog: "This live-action reinvention of the 1960s cartoon works best when lightly spoofing the conventions of superhero cinema, but the film goes to the dogs thanks to a drab story and frequent stabs at heartwarming bromides."

And back again: "The Bourne Ultimatum continues to refine the stripped-down, built-for-speed approach of its predecessors," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger. "For two solid hours, it moves relentlessly, intelligently forward, as everything extraneous gets chucked over the side."

"Set into motion with a brilliantly choreographed sequence at London's Waterloo Station - the filmmaking logistics hurt the brain - The Bourne Ultimatum essentially amounts to one long chase scene, yet the tension never really flags," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. What's more, "the Bourne movies have left behind perhaps the strongest residue of mainstream anti-government paranoia since 70s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. And all while kicking ass, of course."

"What actually happens to Jason Bourne is essentially immaterial," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "What matters is that something must happen, so he can run away from it or toward it." 3½ stars.

"The peculiar achievement of The Bourne Ultimatum is conveying a sense of genuine resolution to its story while dispensing for the most part with, well, its story," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve. "Indeed, one can talk about character and plot all day long and still not get to the essence of what makes The Bourne Ultimatum so ruthlessly effective. The real intelligence at work here is that Greengrass and co. know not to gummy up the works with extraneous plot or exposition. Call it what you will, but the correct word is 'awesome.'"

"[I]t might be best to watch the movie as Greengrass' second 9/11 statement," suggests the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "If United 93 showed the tragedy, The Bourne Ultimatum shows an America living with the aftermath.... This is a movie about fear - a government's fear of its citizens and citizens' fear of their government. It's a movie about surveillance, with people being watched at virtually every moment. Finally, it's about philosophies in collision, about how much safety can be bought at the price of freedom and about the kinds of personalities that gravitate toward the totalitarian mind-set."

"I find it hard to express how welcome a movie like this feels right now, coming as it is like a big meaty dinner after three straight months of sugar-laden desserts," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

Updates, 8/5: "The Bourne movies are perfect thrillers for our slippery, uncertain times: globe-spanning, technocratic, cool-temperature epics of high-speed information and fractured identity," writes Sight & Sound editor Nick James in the new Observer Film Magazine. "They enjoy the frisson of Cold War nostalgia, yet they also revel in the moral chaos of the now, as much as in their signature car chases. They are the perfect revision of James Bond as if by John le Carré. And conversely, they are also the most obvious influence on Daniel Craig's new James Bond in Casino Royale, a less far-fetched creation than of old. But there's one particular aspect of the Bourne movies that tells us more about ourselves, and about the way Hollywood sees the world now, than anything else, and that is their idea of the enemy." Related: Dan Bradley on coordinating the stunts.

Rebecca Winters Keegan talks with Greengrass and Damon for Time.

Mick Brown talks with Greengrass for the Telegraph.

Online listening tip. Greengrass on All Things Considered.

"What Greengrass excels at in his recent movies is sustaining moment and momentum," writes Ray Pride.

"The Bourne Ultimatum is a sensationally entertaining rush of wall-to-wall, wire-to-wire, pedal-to-metal excitement, an uncommonly satisfying mix of pulp-fiction plotting, dead-serious emotion, steel-trap intelligence and razzle-dazzle technique," writes Joe Leydon:

For me, the most powerful image in the entire trilogy is in a scene that appears early in The Bourne Supremacy (and is reprised, briefly, in Ultimatum), as Jason Bourne sees the woman he loves literally floating out of sight, becoming a mere memory even as he helpless watches. (It's an image I suspect Jean Cocteau would have been proud to include in his Orpheus.) These days, it's not uncommon for an action movie to post a three-digit body count, and make a joke about it. But this scene in Supremacy puts the sting back into death, and none-too-gently reminds us that such carnage is something we blithely take for granted, and usually accept unthinkingly, in films of this sort.

"I'd like to use The Bourne Ultimatum as a stick with which to beat modern American movies," blogs Michael Atkinson, "which may not be completely fair to Paul Greengrass's movie, mildly mature and refreshingly nitty-gritty summer-actioner that it is. But there's something wrong on display here, something essentially amiss with the basic syntax of contemporary moviemaking as it has evolved in Hollywood - and, yes, I'm talking about camera style, which in this case (as in The Bourne Supremacy and countless other new films) suggests nothing so much as what a movie would look like if it were shot from inside of a high-speed clothes dryer."

"The Bourne Ultimatum gets, as of the moment of this posting, a 94 percent positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it, if my calculations are correct, only second to Ratatouille in the best-reviewed-movies-of-the-summer contest," notes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "I liked it fine myself, but looking at some of the writeups I wonder if I shouldn't have been harder on it, just to counter the near-ridiculous rapturousness."

Updates, 8/6: "In this day and age where it seems like more and more things that would normally be considered evil are being allowed in order to supposedly bring about good, Ultimatum feels especially relevant and charged," writes Jason Morehead, who also points to Steven Greydanus's review. "But here’s the thing that makes Ultimatum so great: Greengrass never brings up these thoughts and comments at the expense of the film’s story and characters."

Ultimatum's pulled in $70.2 million in the US, "giving Universal Pictures one of the strongest openings in its history," reports Brooks Barnes in the NYT.

John Patterson talks with Greengrass for the Guardian.

"The film has such an assured, documentary-style texture (and Damon brings such effortless gravitas to the Bourne character) that you barely register that every aspect of the plot, from its amnesiac superpowered hero to the miraculously preserved clue Bourne retrieves from a car explosion, is utterly ludicrous," writes Paul Matwychuk. "The Bourne Ultimatum is a hot mug of moviegoing adrenaline (yeah, that's right: moviegoing adrenaline. It tastes a little like cinnamon); I wanted to run out of the theatre, then run back in and see it again. But I didn't. I'm not Jason Bourne, and I was too afraid the ushers would catch me."

Posted by dwhudson at July 30, 2007 6:08 AM