The Bourne Ultimatum Movie Review

Matt Damon never smiles in The Bourne Supremacy. I think that’s also true in The Bourne Ultimatum, which is the darker and slightly more sinister installment in the trilogy. It picks up where the previous film left off, after Bourne has tried to achieve some redemption by apologizing to the young woman whose life he altered when he murdered her parents. Most of the movie cleverly, it turns out, takes place between that apology scene and the epilogue of The Bourne Supremacy in which he calls Pam Landy and insinuates that he’s looking at her through her office window.

The Bourne Supremacy Movie Review

If The Bourne Identity was the grounded, relaxed version of an action spy film, then its first sequel The Bourne Supremacy is the next step in kineticism, ratcheting up the energy as Bourne remembers more about his past and becomes more deeply embroiled in layers of cover-ups he can’t understand.

It picks up two years after the events of the first film. Bourne and Marie are hiding out in India until an assassin (Karl Urban) shows up and accidentally kills Marie (Franka Potente) instead of Bourne. Meanwhile in Berlin, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), a CIA bureaucrat, is working a case to uncover a mole within the organization. Someone is also setting up Bourne as a rogue agent. The old Treadstone project that made Bourne has become Blackbriar. Landy is kept at arm’s length by Abbott (Brian Cox, returning in his role as the head of the Black Ops program).

From My Collection: The Bourne Identity Movie Review

I’m revisiting the original trilogy of Bourne Movies after seeing Jason Bourne. I guess that’s backwards, but the inspiration didn’t strike until I found myself disappointed in the new movie. Seeing how frenetic the editing was, I felt that Paul Greengrass had taken his style to an extreme. I didn’t recall that the two he directed were similarly edited.

The Bourne Legacy Movie Review

Tony Gilroy, so desperate along with Universal Studios, to continue the cash cow of the Jason Bourne film series that he personally crafted and adapted from books to films, went ahead with a fourth film even after Matt Damon, the series’ eponymous hero, bowed out. How can you have a Bourne film without Bourne? They could have decided to make it something like the Bond series, replacing the actor periodically as they age out of the role, providing the character contemporary problems to confront. But then it would have run the risk of copycat syndrome, I guess. So instead Gilroy, with the help of his brother Dan, decided with The Bourne Legacy to keep it all in the same universe, but provide a new protagonist in Aaron Cross, a super-assassin involved in a program similar to the Treadstone project that created Bourne. It’s an expansion of the Robert Ludlum series of books, taking the title, but nothing of the story, from the fourth book, which wasn’t even written by Ludlum. Confused? It doesn’t matter because The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum had already deviated far from Ludlum’s novels.