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.

Jason Bourne Movie Review

Jason Bourne’s story was told through a trilogy of films that concluded nearly a decade ago. From The Bourne Identity, which saw Matt Damon playing the title amnesiac trying to figure out who he was, why people were trying to kill him, and how he was so capable with his fists, his language, automobiles, and weapons, to the capper The Bourne Ultimatum in which he remembers everything and handily exposes the CIA program that made him who he was we saw Damon and director Paul Greengrass (for the two sequels) reinvent the action spy thriller for the new millennium. Bourne’s story being complete, the franchise attempted to skew in a different direction with Jeremy Renner starring. Now Damon and Greengrass have reunited, I suppose catching on to the popularity of series reboots that have cropped up all over Hollywood in recent years.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Movie Review

If you find yourself asking “What happened?” at the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, don’t assume you’re alone. This is not because it’s confounding to the point of being indecipherable, but rather for its insistence on avoiding the clichés of spy thrillers that we’ve grown so accustomed to.

To summarize the plot could take all day. Based on the John le Carré novel, the story is set at the upper echelons of British Intelligence in the thick of the Cold War, when Britain and Russia each had spies working to subvert the other and each likely had moles working in the other’s foreign office. Le Carré knows something about British Intelligence, having worked there for many years before retiring and devoting himself full time to writing spy thrillers. His work is the antithesis to Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, which rely heavily on action and thrills, where Bond’s moral clarity is rarely, if ever, questioned. The characters that le Carré creates live in a world of moral ambiguity. Their conflicts are within their own offices and directed internally much more than toward any foreign power. That this story involves the presence of a well-placed mole at the top of British Intelligence is just par for the course.