The Bourne Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum - 8.0 While guilty of several of the same action genre cliches as Live Free or Die Hard (and every other action movie made), this movie worked for a number of reasons: -I am normally pretty ambivalent towards heavy usage of the hand-held camera, but as it was in Greengrass's other films United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy, it was perfect here. It gave the overall film a much grittier and less polished feel, and in turn, the big action set pieces didn't feel staged and were much more intense, suspenseful, exciting, entertaining, and pretty much any other positive adjective you want to use. -Matt Damon's understated performance was perfect. In fact, he hardly speaks the entire movie. This is a nice contrast to most action movies that inundate you with corny one-liners and bad dialogue. Ultimatum did have the one scene where the hero gets a lengthy explanation from one of the bad guys, which is apparently mandated by the screenwriters guild for every action movie, even though there is absolutely no reason said bad guy would ever feel the need to give an explanation in a real life scenario. But I'm willing to write this, as well as other annoyances like the invincibility of the hero, off as necessary plot devices. -I personally enjoy the Bourne movies because of the globe-trotting locales where the action takes place. In Ultimatum, my favorite was an awesome chase scene in Tangier that ended with the Bourne film staple, the hand to hand fight between Damon and another badass where you feel like your sitting two feet away. The reaction shot of Stiles after this fight ended was infinitely funnier than any one-liner could ever have been. The 15 or 20 minutes in Tangier and the scene in Waterloo station in London were up there with the opening chase in Casino Royale as the most exciting, most suspenseful, most jaw-dropping action sequences in recent memory. And for the record, there were no massive explosions in any of these scenes (though on second thought, there was one at the end of the chase in Casino Royale, but the memorable part was when they ran/jumped/swung/etc/etc through the construction sight). -A final unique aspect of Ultimatum that I appreciated was that it shunned the chance to establish a cheap romantic storyline between Damon and Julia Stiles. This was an especially good idea because it removed the requirement for Stiles to even attempt to act. Bottom line, The Bourne Ultimatum is an exciting, intelligent, and highly entertaining thriller. For now, it is going behind 300 and ahead of Knocked Up in the 2 spot of my top 10 of the (so far disappointing) year. I have several other movies to review but gave Bourne priority since there's actually a chance someone else will watch it. I'll post some more reviews in the next few days.