The Bourne Redundancy

We saw The Bourne Ultimatum today. To fully appreciate the movie and this review, you need to remember the details of all three movies. To recap:

The Bourne Identity - 2002
Amnesia-suffering former assassin Jason Bourne seeks to reconcile the events of his past, while government agents try to hunt him down and kill him.

The Bourne Supremacy - 2004
Amnesia-suffering former assassin Jason Bourne seeks to reconcile the events of his past, while government agents try to hunt him down and kill him.

The Bourne Ultimatum - 2007
Amnesia-suffering former assassin Jason Bourne seeks to reconcile the events of his past, while government agents try to hunt him down and kill him.

Truly, there hasn't been such a wild variety of unexpected plot twists since the Rocky movies. Which is not to say that The Bourne Ultimatum is bad, but it sure isn't anything new. If you liked the first two, then you'll like this one... but you might not remember which is which. The Bourne Ultimatum is a perfectly adequate action movie. In fact, it's incredibly adequate, mind-bogglingly mediocre, and brain-bendingly bland. In fact, it's so fantastically average, that it would actually have to be worse just to be any better. The movie so unmemorable, that even if every actor had gone through the entire movie in the nude, painted blue, and on fire, I still would have forgotten what I'd just seen by the time I got to my car. And yet, it's still a decent movie. It's just so.... so.... "so-so".

Ben Aff- I mean, Matt Damon (MATT DAMON!!), a.k.a. overrated generic actor No. 235, does his usual adequate job in portraying the untouchable hero devoid of any personality. Since it's obvious they were going for "average" anyway for this series of movies, Damon is probably the best actor they could have gotten. Or "most appropriate" actor, I should say. The words "Damon" and "best actor" should never belong in the same sentence.

By the time I got out of there, I wasn't quite sure if I'd just seen the newest Bourne movie, or one of the earlier ones again. It doesn't really matter; they're pretty much interchangeable. Tell someone you're going to show them the Bourne trilogy, and you can either show them all three in a row, 1-2-3, or you can get creative and show them 2-3-2 or 3-1-1 or 2-2-2. They won't know the difference. You could probably even put them in one of those 3-DVD disc changers, and have it show scenes from all three in random order, maybe even mixed in with with Good Will Hunting or Saving Private Ryan just for the heck of it. Mix it up, it can only make it better.

An Open Letter To Filmmakers:

Using a hand-held shaky-cam was a nice little gimmick a few decades ago, but it's time to move on. Having the film shot by an epileptic Chihuahua doesn't make the movie any more immersive. It doesn't make the movie edgy or raw or interesting. All it does is make the action scenes harder to follow, and makes your audience nauseous. If you can afford to spend 100 million dollars on a movie, you can spend 50 bucks on a tripod. For Gawd's sake, now that the MPAA rating has gotten so detailed that they include every little offensive thing... "Rated R for Brief Nudity, Pervasive Crude Humor, Light Drug Use, Violence, Language, and a Bad Haircut"... could they not start listing things like "Vomit-inducing shaky-cam"? I find that a lot more offensive than nudity.