Article+-+Bye,+Bye+Good+American+Spy

The Bourne denouement leaves Matt Damon, 169 stuntmen and the audience exhausted



Film review by Philip French in The Observer August 19

THAT time-honoured Hollywood command 'Cut to the chase!' is the order of the day in the Bourne trilogy. Indeed, in the second of the series, Paul Greengrass's The Bourne Supremacy, ruthless CIA boss Brian Cox actually says: 'Cut to the chase, Pam' when his junior colleague Pam Landy (Joan Allen) starts on a third sentence. Each movie hurtles breathlessly along with the most rapid editing in film history and an urgent, percussive score to match it. The third one, Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum, is up to standard and likely to be one of the summer's most successful films, as the first was in 2002 and the second in 2004. In fact the first two made $850m at the US box office alone, while the new one took $70m on its first weekend, a record for an August release. On the strength of this, the Forbes organisation in its newly established 'Ultimate Star Payback' list names Matt Damon as 'Hollywood's best investment'. He's the actor who currently returns the most bucks in relation to his fee: $29 for every dollar he's paid. Brad Pitt takes second place. Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise are way behind with a payback only slightly more than a third of Damon's. Surprisingly Jennifer Aniston is the most profitable actress. But enough of money. Back to art.

In the first film, Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity, tough, baby-faced Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is fished out of the Mediterranean, riddled with bullet-holes and discovering he's a member of that familiar movie society, Amnesia Interna tional. It's a fantasy we all have: of starting again from scratch and finding out that we're much more interesting than we and others think we are. Bourne's journey of discovery takes him all over Europe, being joined on his quest by the beautiful German girl Marie (Franka Potente), who, like Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps, is initially suspicious, then urgently co-operative when she discovers Bourne is a decent man running for his life.

His job, it transpires, is that of an ace CIA assassin who speaks numerous languages, is a martial artist as cold as a Luger in the hands of an Inuit and thinks as he runs. For some reason, the CIA wants him dead and for once, instead of saying 'terminate', agent Conklin (Chris Cooper) says: 'I want Bourne in a bodybag by sundown.' The code words 'Treadstone' and 'Blackbriar' are used but never explained.

Having discovered who he is but not why he's targeted, Bourne retreats with Marie, only to be tracked down to an idyllic retreat in Goa at the beginning of The Bourne Supremacy, which again takes our hero round Europe, now with the additional excuse of revenging his lover's murder. Moreover, he's told by Pam Landy that though he may have been Bourne yesterday, the day before that he was not a creature of the agency but an innocent Midwesterner called David Webb. That was his 'true identity', his 'real self', if there are such things in this existential world.

The third and concluding film has even less than its predecessors to do with Robert Ludlum's right-wing, patriotic, airport blockbusters. It follows on – thematically at least – from the tradition of thrillers mocking, warning against or exposing the activities of the espionage establishment that got under way in the late Fifties and early Sixties with Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Len Deighton's The Ipcress File. In post-9/11 mode, The Bourne Ultimatum views the American intelligence agencies as less controlled than ever. As Peter Wright's co-author on Spycatcher, Paul Greengrass knows a fair bit about this subject.

Between the second and third Bourne films, Damon starred in the sober, much underrated The Good Shepherd as a career espionage agent, recruited from Yale to serve during the Second World War with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and then with its Cold War successor, the CIA. Over the years, he comes to understand the corruption inherent in uncontrolled clandestine activities. As Jason Bourne, he has gone through a similarly disillusioning experience – from idealistic patriotism to realistic awareness – only in a much shorter time. His enemies have been licensed to do what they want. There's a Top Secret Anti-Terrorist Headquarters in Manhattan with carte blanche to spy on the world. No more red tape, they've been told. They pore over screens that give them instant access to secret information, surveillance equipment and teams of armed killers around the world.

These unscrupulous, unaccountable public servants resemble the CIA operatives pursuing Robert Redford's good-guy whistleblower in Three Days of the Condor, the essential model for the Bourne films, and back in 1975 their offices were in that symbol of anonymous power, the World Trade Centre.

Bourne's final journey begins in Moscow, where he's been tracking down the daughter of his first victim as an assassin and, as usual, he has brief, blurred flashbacks signifying returning memories. He's led to London where he wants to contact Simon Ross, an investigative reporter from the Guardian (Paddy Considine), who's writing a series of articles on the Bourne case based on inside information.

There's a brilliant sequence, one of the year's finest pieces of moviemaking, in which Bourne arranges a rendezvous with Ross at Waterloo station. In New York, the CIA track the reporter's progress every foot of the way there and the station is soon full of armed American agents, all with info on their quarries. Moreover, and quite casually, the CIA tunes into and deploys the station's CCTV cameras for its own lethal purposes. Can this be possible? Not everything in these films is credible, but such a degree of surveillance seems highly plausible. It feeds on our paranoia about civil liberties and is as exciting as it is scary. More and increasingly spectacular chases follow in Madrid, Tangier and New York before a denouement which is perfunctory and something of a letdown. But by then, we're ready for a rest, as is Jason Bourne himself, and perhaps the film's 169 stunt performers as well. Except for Bourne, the men emerge badly from this trilogy.

The women, however, come out extremely well. The CIA agents played by Joan Allen and Julia Stiles are brave and principled and Franka Potente was a strong presence in the earlier films as Bourne's confidante. Christopher Rouse's editing is dazzling, the script (by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z Burns and George Nolfi) is efficient and there's not a four-letter word in the whole film.

I can do without a fourth Bourne picture, but I look forward to Greengrass's film of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's devastating piece of reportage on life in Baghdad.

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