Jason Bourne (2016)
Are you a Bourne or a Bond? I lean toward the former, and as someone who has recently undergone some security vetting I can’t seem to evade all matters espionage at the moment. Firstly, I re-watched The Parrallax View, probably my favourite of Alan J. Pakula’s influential conspiracy trilogy along with Klute and All The Presidents Men – it’s on Netflix and remains conspiratorialy outstanding. I was also overjoyed to see The Americans Season 3 recruited to my asset profile. I’ve frantically burned through thirteen episodes in a couple of days and the series goes from strength to strength, but for those other fans I have just two words – ‘suitcase body’ <shudders>. Generally underwhelmed by the recent trailer for Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon’s return to the Bourne franchise my ideology was turned after listening to a lengthy BBC interview, where both chaps outlined some of their inspirations and concepts behind the film in the post Snowden, Wikileaks and contemporary cyber crime era – some uncanny timing strikes again. It’s been almost ten years since the last film in the franchise – yes I’m aware of this but I consider that a side film rather than canon – and whilst I’m not crazy about the series as a whole I did really enjoy the last film back in 2007. Greengrass is a deeply politically driven director and has always used the Bourne films as potent metaphors for his concerns and interests, a manufactured asset killing at the whim of an unregulated and unmonitored bureaucracy, a human drone with an amnesic qualities that appear to reflect the general publics interest in the continued fallout of drone strikes or unconstitutional invasions of their privacy. Yet I remained resistant to a new film as quite simply I thought the franchise had run ts course, it tensely told it’s tale of one man’s struggle to uncover his past and regain his identity over three interlinked entries, and wrapped everything up terrifically with no reason to return to the character other than that old elemental driving force – money. So has the director and co-screenwriter with his editor Christopher Rouse’s insistence that he did have a new story to tell and a reason to muster yet another phenomenally expensive rescue mission for Matt? Not particularly, but this is still a reasonably entertaining couple of hours of entertainment.
Reykjavik, Iceland. After exploiting her affiliation with a local activist group Nicky Parsons (Julia Styles, reprising her role from all three previous entries) infiltrates the CIA deep-net and stumbles across an electronic dossier marked ‘Black Operations’ – clearly some spook was having a particularly literal day when he set this file up. After hooking up with her old comrade Jason Bourne all hell breaks loose, as a kill team descends on them against the backdrop of a Greek austerity protest which turned into a violent riot.What follows is a rinse, wash repeat of the following formula – Bourne engages in a chaos-cinema captured, pulsingly scored bewildering melee against numerous opponents. They are usually some random strike team of Slavic goons who engage our ruthless hero across a variety of international urban theatres – Berlin, London, Cyprus, Vegas. Interspersed with this collapsing delineation of space and rapid fire editing autism we leap back and forth to a CPU screen bathed nerve centre at Langley, where rising CIA cyber-crime savant Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) and grizzled director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) trade barbed witticism and bark urgent orders to their frantically typing subordinates along the lines of ‘track that facial recognition pattern diagnostic’ and ‘deploy all localised assets to liquidate the tangos’. Also on the warpath is a gallic assassin played by Vincent Cassell who seems to harbour some specific enmity against Jason, while a side plot involving a Silicon Valley pioneer (Riz Ahmed) clandestinely working with the CIA to provide a back-door access into his new social media service will soon decipher its secrets……
Like the other entries in the series Jason Bourne is a relentless picture, barely taking a pause between breaths to provide any real character time or cultural examination as it detonates one identikit set-piece after another. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that but by the time you sense it’s hurtling toward its climax the same action sequencing model starts to malinger, as the hunger pangs of originality, of fresh and nourishing material starts to gnaw on the attention. Damon is as efficient and faceless a cypher as he always is in these pictures, even as Greengrass does feebly attempt to give him some narrative drive through the revelation of deep secrets of his fathers involvement in the Treadgold programme which first wiped his memory and transformed him into a puppet manipulated killer. There is able support from Alicia Vikander although her role does stretch credulity, I’m not being a sexist swine and referring to the fact of some attractive woman being gifted some lethal responsibility, it’s just hard to swallow such a young recruit directing a duo of wet-work specialists when it looks like she graduated a fortnight ago. The eternally gruff Tommy Lee Jones fulfils the same purpose as all the gravitas generating character actors that have been deployed in this franchise, from David Strathaim to Brian Cox, Joan Allen to Albert Finney. Your commitment to the cause will be measured against your instincts toward ‘intensified continuity‘, as this is two hours of hand-held, shivering shaky-cam and rack focuses, with nary a shot held for longer than three seconds. It’s all a little gruelling, and after Greengrass and his DP launched this technique in the middle of the noughties now it’s really starting to outlive it’s then revolutionary welcome, like The Battle Of Algiers directed by Michael Bay, especially when it reaches its Vegas strip final velocity.
The film throws all of wider interests into a churning mix which crushes any real introspection, as the emphasis doggedly remains with crossfires zeroed on carnage and catastrophe. According to Greengrass in that aforementioned interview Las Vegas’s lavish digital conventions are the new recruitment hubs of such influential global players as Goldman Sachs, Soviet intelligence and the Chinese cyber offensive apparatus, but simply setting a sequence in ‘America’s playground’ and not examining any of those queries is lost from the films manifest. For action movie fans though its more than adequate with the globetrotting narrative in full cruising mode, and there are some smirk inducing quirks, as Bourne is always two steps ahead of his pursuers and experienced enough to expect double and triple crosses to ricochet around the screen like turbo-charged Tasmanian devil. I’d love to see a brilliant fiction film focused on some of the more pressing social, political and cultural issues that arise from our swiftly evolving digital culture but that still seems to be the sole preserve of the documentary. This for example is supposed to be great and the Menagerie is eagerly awaiting the new Herzog, as opposed to the hard-drive crashes of The Fifth Estate, or by the looks of things Oliver Stones next screed, although to be fair Blackhat has slightly evened the odds*. In any case you’re busy people who need to get back into the field, so this dossier’s executive summary reads thus – Jason Bourne is superior to the Renner but it’s no Ultimatum;
* Yeah, I realise I omitted the fantastic Mr. Robot from this analysis, but that’s small screen so it doesn’t count. That’s my excuse anyway…..
Captain Philips (2013)
Tom Hank’s cunning pincer movement to net another best actor gong is represented by two films this year, the Disneyfied courting of the author of Mary Poppins in Saving Mr Banks, and as the distressed ship’s captain facing down ruthless Somali pirates in Captain Philips – I’m not sure which is more terrifying. Personally speaking a cruel elixir of Disney and Mary Poppins is likely to induce a sea-sickening nausea in yours truly but I’m more than happy to board Paul Greengrass’s hulking political metaphor, as in the Indian sea a vast shipping container attracts limpet criminals to a capitalist whale, overflowing with an abundance of goods and products and the prospect of mercenary material gain. I quite like Hanks, in interviews he always comes across as an extraordinarily friendly and genial sort in interviews and junkets, a genuinely nice guy whom over the years he has moved steadily and proficiently from the frat-boy humor of his early roles to the towering seriousness and Oscar pulsing bait of big ‘important’ pictures. He has a definitive screen charisma which anchors an American pragmatism in both his historical and contemporary roles , a modern Henry Fonda you’d enjoying grabbing a hotdog with or maybe a less remote Gary Cooper you could grab a beer with, I can even forgive him for the offensive politics of Forrest Gump but that, as they say, is another story. But maybe, just maybe there is a black-hearted career driven psychopath beneath that genial carapace which would throw his own mother under a bus if it furthered his career*, as I think you can never fully trust a man who sports two christian names – think George Lucas, Bruce Willis, Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, or Prince Charles.
Based on a true story whose authenticity is inevitably being questioned – apparently the non-fictional counterpart was allegedly a lot more renegade with his crews and passengers safety – the film is lifted from a 2009 incident where the Maersk Alabama , a civilian cargo ship was assaulted by a desperate group of Kalashnikov wielding Somali’s, their khat chomping leader Muse (Barkhad Abdi) and his erratic henchmen being briefly sketched as rather desperate young men driven to such extremes by the desperate socio-economic conditions of their broken country in an opening, context setting sequence. In fact the film is a surprising two-hander with Philips and Muse’s positions being given almost equal station, Philips remarking to his wife (Catherine Keener in roughly 90 seconds of screen-time for some odd reason) in a similar first act manoeuvre that ‘everything is moving so fast these days’ and ‘our children must learn to navigate a very different world’ which flares the directors thematic intentions, of desperate and confusing times presaging increasingly desperate measures.
Screenwriter Billy Ray has based this tense testimony on 2010’s breathless A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea and as you’d expect from a filmmaker with the adrenaline pumping calibre of Greengrass after that opening the technique is urgent, nervous and as choppy as the waters under which the drama unfolds, but I am simply tired and exhausted of his now distracting roving camera and frenetic editing rhythms, what once could signal an urgent momentum to his pulse racing narratives is tedious, alienating and confusing, he really needs to evolve as a filmmaker as he’s starting to resemble a clichéd bore. Speaking of dinosaurs this is might be my mood but I could not generate one iota of sympathy for the hi-jackers despite these submerged intentions, I wanted these violent idiots to be executed as swiftly as possible, and some rather signposted lulls in the action are exploited to punch a political message which falls well short of pathos or potential. Of course Greengrass is slightly more mature than the likes of a Michael Bay, a McG or other action directors of that ilk, and although he doesn’t get Hanks to hip-check a pirate into the drink, grasp his AK47 and begin pouring down a holocaust of hot leaden vengeance on the hoodlums he does have something of a hard-on for the military hardware once it arrives to muddy the waters, whilst I’m a bloke who enjoys exterminating faceless goons in computer games such as Military Industrial Recruitment VI: The Clones Of Saddam as much as the next Neanderthal this quiet acquiesence to overwhelming American force stands in an odd displacement to the previously deployed thematic depth-charges.
Hanks is desperately convincing as the terse Philips whom is just about keeping his head above a swamping sense of panic as the situation grows increasingly desperate and claustrophobic, and I must admit that the final sequence is exceptionally arranged with a terrific final scene which is just about worthy of the preceding two hours of uneven and turbulent intentions, but it takes a long time coming so for me I find it difficult to recommend this other than a home viewing option when it lands on disk sometime in the new year. Maybe I’m slighty miffed as evidently commentators with swifter pens than I have identified a trend of survival movies this year – I had already plugged this observation into my gestating and increasingly mammoth Films of The Year post (which is marinating very nicely thank you) so whilst for me this doesn’t assail the urgent heights of Gravity or All Is Lost your fathomage may vary, but make sure you reserve some resources to see next weeks major interstellar release;
* Yes I’m joking of course, my favourite Hanks story is this – on the pre-production of Saving Private Ryan as directors like to do Spielberg sent the entire team on a brutal regime of basic training to manufacture a sense of a group who lived together in an intense combat situation, to create a sense of close camaraderie. That big, burly tough-guy Vin Diesel led a revolution against the programme after 24 hours claiming that the exhausting process was pointless and stupid, and it was Hanks who quietly took him aside and instructed him to ‘man-the-fuck-up’ as they were representing heroes who had made the ultimate sacrifice for Europe and America – they all meekly reported back for duty the next day.
Minty's Menagerie 
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