Jason Bourne

Billion Dollar Bourne

Jason Bourne
2016 USA Directed by Paul Greengrass
UK cinema release print. 

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Hmmm.... okay, I’ll jump right in here with a quick history of my reaction to the Jason Bourne films. Still haven’t seen the Richard Chamberlain version of The Bourne Identity but it’s in the ‘to watch’ pile and I will get to that soon. Absolutely loved the Matt Damon remake of The Bourne Identity... one of the great spy films to join the classics such as The IPCRESS File (reviewed here), The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed here) and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, as far as I’m concerned. Then Paul Greengrass took over as director for The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum and, although the story content and acting etc was fine, the camera movement and editing made the action sequences barely watchable at best and, certainly, incomprehensible at their worst. There were some redeeming features in Supremacy such as Bourne’s visit to the daughter of two of his past victims but, ultimately, I didn’t think much of these movies other than continuing to love what John Powell was doing with the music in them.

Surprisingly, the Jeremy Renner starring The Bourne Legacy (reviewed here), while having an atrociously simplistic story which the writers seemed to be trying to disguise by giving it as many links to the Matt Damon films as possible, was actually quite entertaining. James Newton Howard’s score was cool too and I expect he might have gotten the gig with that after turning out an incredible pseudo-Bourne score for the Angelina Jolie vehicle Salt (reviewed here), a few years earlier.

And so now we come to Matt Damon’s semi-triumphant return to the Bourne films, along with Greengrass returning as director and.... it’s a mixed bag to be honest. I say semi-triumphant because, although I’m sure it will do the right numbers at the box office, Jason Bourne really doesn’t have too much going for it but, at least in terms of Matt Damon, his performance is worth watching, as always. So at least we have a credible main lead and the film feels like it’s got some kind of authentic link to the Bourne series.  However, even a great actor like Damon needs to have a half decent script to work from and... I really don’t think he got that here. In fact, this feels just as simplistic as The Bourne Legacy in terms of story content and no amount of heavy weight actors brought into this melange of  various, patched together conspiratorial shenanigans going on at the CIA is going to help make this anything which could reach the dizzying heights of the first movie.

We also have the return of Julia Stiles as Nicky Parsons in this, who really helps Damon keep this movie afloat, and as far as I could tell she’s the only other series regular in this one other than the title character. However, the way she's written in this story and her stupidity at attracting attention to herself, while brilliantly played by Stiles, really doesn’t do the character any favours. Well done to Stiles for making it work but, like most of this film, it’s the writing that’s the problem... not the acting.

The heavyweights I was referring to earlier are the three main supporting cast with Tommy Lee Jones as CIA Director Robert Dewey, Vincent Cassel as ‘The Asset’ (aka kick ass Bourne style assassin bad guy) and the relatively young Alicia Vikander as CIA tech guru Heather Lee. All of these people are good but they all serve a bad storyline. Jones is very much in the mould of CIA Directors from the previous films so, we pretty much know what’s coming from him and do we really need to see the CIA playing political games against each other involving fellow agents who are aggressively ‘taken out’ when they start to get in the way... yet again in the Bourne series? Can’t some of them just play as a team, once in a while. Vikander is pretty strong and just about manages to pull off the gravitas needed that not having so much ‘old timer character baggage’ from other films almost hinders. Her character works quite well and it’s someone the audience can root for as a possible ‘non evil’ character most of the time.

Vincent Cassel is always a nasty bad guy but, here, he really could have done with being given more lines, I think. Also, it has to be said, certain revelations about his character further serve to highlight just how amateurish the story is here. We have a back story to everything we already know about the Jason Bourne saga and his links to Treadstone, which is grafted on wholesale for this movie and which brings in Jason Bourne’s father... and what happened to him just before Bourne joined the CIA. When we get a true reveal on just who Cassel is playing in this, very near the end of the movie, it’s actually one of those things which you think of very early and then dismiss because, hey, that would be really lazy story telling, right? Everything seems to connect in this movie just a little too conveniently and way more than you would expect it to in real life... it seems to me. Cassel’s character is pretty much a victim to the cause and effect method of storytelling that a lot of US cinema tends to fall back on, crutch -like, these days and it’s a shame that the writers felt the need to do this, I think.

In terms of the way the camera moves and the editing... well it’s certainly fast paced but it suffers from the “Paul Greengrass special” school of filmmaking in that, a) the camera never stops moving around and b) it’s lots of short shots cut together continuously which, to be honest, can be more than a little disorientating and distracting  from the main action on-screen. I have to put my hand up and say, for once in a Paul Greengrass movie, I wasn’t totally lost in the action sequences and, for 90% of it, I was managing to figure out just what was going on. However, the editing and vertiginous camerawork never lets up and, after a while, you are just left wondering as to which part of the screen the director wants to show you, to be honest.

Composer John Powell returns to the fold with this one and he’s joined by composer David Buckley. Now I don’t know who scored which bits or what the nature of the collaboration was but I did notice how good the score throughout the movie was, when I could hear it above the ‘extra loud and in your face’ sound effects tracks. I’m looking forward to acquiring this asset on CD in a week or so and it will be interesting to hear it properly, away from the pop pop bang bang noises. The Jason Bourne theme is all over the movie but I wasn’t able to detect the Treadstone Assassin motif in this first sitting. I’m sure it must be on there though and this score certainly feels like it belongs in a traditional Jason Bourne film... so I would be interested in knowing who composed which bits.

Other than the score and the acting performances, however, it’s really not a good entry into The Jason Bourne series and, while it is pacey and quite entertaining, it has nothing of the power of the endings in previous Matt Damon entires in the franchise. The end here seems very contrived and, ultimately,  a bit anticlimactic... especially in terms of how Bourne is able to see and hear things for his not so mind blowing twist at the end. Even so, every plot point seems designed to propel the action forward without actually telling you what it really is everybody is playing this game for and I thought it really out of character when Bourne doesn’t run from it all at the start. All in all, if you like the previous Bourne films then I don’t think you’ll have a particularly bad time at the cinema with this one... it’s just not quite reaching that high bar which was set previously. It’s worth a watch if you like action spy movies with not much plot, though... so yeah, if that’s what you’re in to, maybe give Jason Bourne a go. There are a lot of worse things out there in the local cinemas at the moment.

Bastille Day

Inglorious Bastilles

Bastille Day
2016 France/USA
Directed by James Watkins
UK cinema release print.

I really wanted to like Bastille Day. I’d seen the trailer and, though it felt a little flat in places, it looked like a solid action thriller in the now familiar mode of a cop using a roguish criminal to save the day, despite antagonism from both the criminal underworld and the police department. And that’s more or less what this is, to be honest... except the main lead, played by Idris Elba, is a CIA agent working in Paris, and he uses a pickpocket who has been mistaken for a terrorist to crack open and foil a possible terrorist plot on Bastille Day in France. Trouble is that, like the trailer, it’s an okay action thriller... not a great one.

The fault certainly doesn’t fall in the laps of the actors though. I’ve been a fan of Idris Elba in film (not seen his TV stuff) since I saw him in the second Ghost Rider movie and he does an excellent job here. Tempering his tough guy, rather imposing personae by having an action hero, Briar, that will also get bashed about a bit and doesn’t always clear out of the way of the traps before they happen. So a more realistic, in some sense, version of the kind of kinetic characters you usually get in this kind of movie. Richard Madden plays the pickpocket, Michael, working with Briar to foil the dastardly plot and clear his own name in the process, after he stole a bag and then dumped it before it exploded and killed four people. And they, and all the other supporting actors in here, do a really good job with the movie, creating quick and credible characters that the shorthand of their trade would permit in this kind of punch and chase driven bullet bonanza.

And some of it is nicely done, to be sure. The problem, I think, doesn’t fall into the hands of James Watkins either, since the action sequences and small character moments in the film are all handled simply, allowing you easy access into the heart of the story and without losing you at any point. Indeed, he and his editor also manage to use some surprisingly good labour saving moments where the camera movement and style of shot, such as a zoom, will take you into a later part of the same sequence using a similar style and speed of shot, neatly cutting out unnecessary footage and all without confusing the audience... which is a pretty neat trick and to be applauded, actually. Especially when he does it in the middle of an action sequence and then you find yourself going from mid or close up to a later point in the sequence in long shot of a different view without any transitional glitch at all. Very well done.

Even the score on this one, by Alex Heffes, is quite distinct and holds its own during the noisy shoot outs, ably supporting the action and helping to move things forward. It’s a shame it’s only out on download rather than on CD but, as I’ve said before on here, no CD equals no sale. Downloads are a real turn off for a number of reasons.

However, the film has a huge problem in that it seems to telegraph every twist and turn before it even happens here. Yes, I know we’ve all seen a gazillion other movies like this and so, as an audience, there are a number of permutations of expectations as to what each and every character type is going to do in a movie like this but... shouldn’t the writer be allowing for that and not falling into the clichés created by those kinds of situations? This film really is full of little twists that, honestly, everyone is going to see coming way before they happen. I was going through the whole movie thinking things like... “Oh, this character is going to get ‘shockingly’ shot dead by this ‘friendly’ character in about 30 seconds” or “This character is in no real danger here because the other guy the audience is supposed to have forgotten about is just standing over there, ready to make an appearance”, and so on. There really are no surprises in this movie and that really harms it a lot because there actually isn’t a lot else that these kinds of films have going for them, to be honest.

And, though the main leads are likeable and start building up a relationship, I think there could have been another one or two sequences put in purely to show the developing chemistry between them because, at a certain point in the film towards the end, I was really wondering why Character B was bothering to put himself back into the line of fire for Character A when, really, he was already in the clear. So, yeah, just a little more character development/interaction stuff in this one would have been nice, to be honest.

Other than that, though, all grumbles aside, there are a lot lesser action thrillers than this one out there and if you’re a fan of Idris Elba, you probably won’t want to miss out on this one... although I really think he could do with a better vehicle than Bastille Day, truth be told. Still, an okay and somewhat unchallenging time at the cinema for action fans. I’m positive there are worse ways to while away an hour and a half. So maybe give it a go if you’re not worried about seeing something a little formulaic in the time you have. It’s not the worst film I’ve seen of its kind, for sure.