I’ll call this the Bourne Trilogy. Yeah I know there are two more books out already but for now there are three movies and that will count as a trilogy. Hell, I still count Star Wars as a trilogy. After a little peek into the books I’m not sure we can count the books as source material for the movies anyway. Very different novels from the films I saw…
We’ll keep this about the Matt Damon flicks, The Bourne Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum. I saw about twenty minutes of the first one in a hotel last year. With the new one coming out, Teresa and I Netflixed the first two and went out to see the new one today.
A man wakes up on a fishing boat after being found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. He has been shot in the back and he also has a Swiss bank account embedded under his skin. He is suffering from amnesia and can’t remember anything about his life before being hauled aboard the fishing boat. He visits the bank and finds a cache of money, passports (with his picture) and a gun. He takes everything but the gun and leaves. By showing up and logging in he has triggered the system and now the CIA knows he is alive and coming for him. He is acutely aware of his surroundings and knows he is being followed, he ducks into the US Embassy. The MPs attempt to arrest him, he is disables them quickly and efficiently. He escapes by hiring a stranger to drive him to Paris; his home address based on the earliest passport. When he arrives, an assassin tries to kill him. Bourne once again displays uncanny skills in defeating the armed man. The girl that drove Bourne to Paris chooses to stay with and now the movie has a love interest. Much too quickly and without any real reason, she has fallen in love with him. While not exactly a captive I suspected a little “Stockholm Syndrome” subplot but no, she is truly in love with him…
They hide at her brother’s house and the assassins find him there too. He uses the new assassin’s phone to find out who is calling the shots and to arrange a meeting. He takes most of the money and gives it to the girl and tells her to leave or she will get killed. While traveling to the meeting he learns that an important dignitary was almost assassinated two weeks ago but that he shot the assailant as he jumped overboard. Bourne now knows that he is an assassin himself. He is starting to remember snippets of his past, he remembers that he aborted his mission to kill this guy because as he pulled his gun up, the dignitary had his children playing on his lap. He turned to abort the assassination and was shot as he was jumping overboard.
Bourne meets his “boss” and tells him that he wants out, off the grid. He escapes and the boss is killed as the secret government project is shut down from higher authority. Bourne finds his girl on a Greek island and they live happily ever after.
UNTIL…
Bourne and his girl have retreated to a beach in India. He is remembering bits and pieces, mostly about a job in Berlin. Half way around the world, the CIA is making a file/money deal. The agents are killed, the files are stolen and Bourne’s fingerprint is planted on the evidence. The assassin who did the killing now arrives in India to kill Bourne. He is spotted and they go on the run. The assassin shoots for Bourne, hits the girl and the car drives off the bridge into the river leaving Bourne for dead. But of course, he’s not.
Now Bourne is back on the grid and trying to find out why he is being targeted again. He knows that the CIA will track him when he shows up and uses that to tap a phone and get the agent in charge’s information. He also finds out from another assassin about the secret agency they are a part of and that he and Bourne are the last two alive. Shortly after, Bourne is the only one alive. Tracking the agent in charge (Landy), he is able to find out watch her and talk to her. When he spots Parsons, the field point of contact from the first movie, he says he’ll talk to her. He meets her but takes her away from all the surveillance to interrogate her. He finds out that he was the first and the best agent of the secret agency. He was the one who killed Alexander Neski, the man who all of the files from the beginning were about and that is the Berlin job he has been having the flashbacks about. When he asks why they are hunting him, she responds that he killed the two agents for the files. He tells her that he was in India when that happened. The transmitter in her coat picks this all up and Landy is starting to have doubts about why the agency wants Bourne dead.
Bourne figures it out, his “boss” in the first movie had a boss who wants to tie up any loose ends. He records a conversation by the higher boss and an agent where the higher boss admits to just about everything but the Kennedy assassination. He sends the tape to Landy and the boss commits suicide when confronted with the evidence.
Bourne then goes to Moscow to meet Neski’s daughter. He apologizes to her and explains that he killed her father and her mother was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was not a murder suicide as reported. He leaves and the last assassin-agent tries to kill Bourne in another spectacular action sequence. The agent dies in a crash and Bourne walks away. He calls Landy and she thanks him for the tape by telling him his real name, date and place of birth. Bourne hangs up and walks into the crowd to live happily ever after.
UNTIL…
A British reporter is writing a story on the enigmatic “Jason Bourne” and meets a high-up source. In a phone conversation with his editor he mentions the project’s codeword and that alerts the CIA. Bourne has traveled back to Europe to tell his girlfriend’s brother what happened to her. As he arrives in London he sees the Newspaper article and contacts the reporter. He sets up a meeting and the CIA follows him to a crowded train station thinking that he must be going to meet his source. They follow him and have a sniper on standby. When the CIA sees that the source is Bourne, they green light the kill. The dumbest sniper in the world shoots the scared civilian reporter first and alerts the trained government spy-assassin to his presence. Of course, Bourne escapes and takes the reporters files with him. The real source is an agent in Madrid. Bourne goes to Madrid, bypasses the most illogical and backward alarm system ever and enters the agent’s offices. The CIA team run by a guy named Vosen has been ordered to bring in Landy, the agent from the second movie. She is treated like she is in the way until she proves that she is the only one able to track Bourne. When he arrives in Madrid, Bourne is attacked by the CIA operatives following him and just as he thinks he is done, in walks Parsons, the lovely field point of contact from the first two movies. She doesn’t take the opportunity to alert the CIA to Bourne’s presence and she goes on the run with him. I guess when one love interest dies we have to develop another… She hints around and gives us all reason to believe that they were involved before Bourne had his agency training. He can’t remember it of course but he is beginning to remember some of the early training tactics.
Parsons tells him that the source has gone on the run to Tangier. They find that an assassin has been sent to kill the source. Parsons uses her clearance to contact the assassin, giving Bourne a chance to track him and save the source. He ends up failing to save the guy and now he and Parsons have become next on the hit list. After another action scene, the assassin is dead, Parsons is going on the run and Bourne is heading to the CIA in New York.
Landy, who is getting suspicious of the agency’s willingness to kill everyone and anyone, (including their own agents) contacts Bourne after he puts himself back on the grid. She repeats her earlier conversation telling him who he is and his date of birth. The CIA is monitoring her calls so when Bourne sends her a text telling her to meet him at an address, the entire CIA rolls to get there before her. It was all a diversion and Bourne breaks into Vosen’s office to get the files on the secret agency. He proceeds to the coded address Landy gave him in their conversation. Vosen realizes what is going on and races to the same address. Landy meets Bourne and she says something is wrong with the agency. Bourne gives the files to her and tells her to “do something about it”. Then he goes up to the training facility where he once became Jason Bourne.
Vosen finds Landy but she has already used the fax machine to get the documents exposed. Upstairs, Bourne meets the doctor that conditioned his mind when he entered the program. He starts to remember that he volunteered for the mission and the training. Just as he is starting to remember more, agents bust in the door to kill him. He escapes to the roof where he is chased and is shot by Vosen. He falls into the river and is presumed dead.
Parsons is shown watching a news report about the exposure of the secret agency and that all the bad guys are going to jail and that Jason Bourne was shot and fell into the river where he died. Parsons smiles knowing that he is too tough for that and sure enough, we flip back to his body floating in the river jerking to life and swimming away, presumably to live happily ever after.
UNTIL… the next movie, “The Bourne Prequel” or whatever they have cooked up for this.
These three movies were based (very loosely) on the Robert Ludlum books. There are two others, “The Bourne Legacy” and “The Bourne Betrayal” but they are by another author and with the success these three movies have found I think it would be hard for them to let this franchise die out just because they changed authors.
I liked the movies. There were little moments throughout them that made me cringe and want to holler BS! But for the most part they were good. There were plenty of “over the top” action sequences but they never went so far over the top where it was completely unbelievable. The closest they came to that is Bourne walking away from so many high speed car wrecks. He braces/prepares for them and all but still the trauma his body must be going through should kill him. If his body isn’t showing any wear, the cars are always crashed up and damaged. That’s a good sign. We don’t have enough “quality” car chases in modern movies anymore. Now that I’ve said this, someone will go out and do a remake of “Bullitt”. Ugh, I hope not!
So the only other thing I thought sucked was that there were too many close-up “shaky-cam” shots. It was like they had Michael J. Fox running the camera. (For those of you that get that little joke, yes, I am all packed for my journey into Hell…) It gave the movies a touch of reality but maybe a bit too much. I was annoyed by it to the point that it took me out of the film rather than drawing me into it.
So we have a Barney Rubble look-a-like playing an amalgam of a reality-James Bond and MacGyver on the run from the government and staying one step ahead because he has superb skills at damn-near everything. Somehow it works. I liked all three of them and I’ll go see a fourth if they make one.
And I got through this entire commentary without making some kind of “Bourne again” joke…
8 of 11 Skulls
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