Matt Damon was really Bourne for it

Saw an unusually in-depth review of a movie recently. Matt Damon's performances in the Bourne trilogy of movies were dissected along with the merits and demerits of some of the cast and crew of the latest movie in the series, The Bourne Ultimatum.

If you've seen any of the trilogy, you'd understand why it could be compared to the James Bond and other legendary cloak and dagger or spy films. The highlights of the movie review:

[....While a police posse is chasing Bourne, he�s hopscotching across rooftops, wrapping a sheet around his hand to vault over a wall with shards of glass on it, and somehow keeping track of the elusive Nicky in a big, unfamiliar city.

Maybe our super-spy�s brain, earlier rewired by The Company, has been accessorized with a Google Earth chip implant.....

The first episodes of the movie trilogy based on Robert Ludlum�s novels — The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004) — picked up the reputation as a thinking man�s spy series. Certainly they were darker, grimier, than the old James Bond films and their glitzy clones.

(The latest Bond, Casino Royale, took some cues from the Bournes: made the hero more brutal, gave the visual a hint of grit.) ..... Bourne, who needs no sleep or food or pee breaks, no downtime at all, he�s closer to the Terminator, a national-security murder machine.....

And in this third and possibly final episode, directed by Paul Greengrass from a script by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, the series has come close to attaining a kinetic perfection.

If Ridley Scott�s Black Hawk Down was the all-war war movie — nearly two hours of nonstop battles — The Bourne Ultimatum is the all-action action movie. A pounding of the eyes and ears (John Powell�s score is all urgent percussion), the movie is one continuous, exhausting, exhilarating chase.

Eluding or dispatching bad guys, fighting off six at a time in a stairwell, wrecking more autos than in a NASCAR blooper reel, Bourne speeds from London to Berlin to Tangier to New York City. Meanwhile his itinerary is monitored by CIA types — the pompous, desperate, George Tenet-y David Strathairn, and the more sympathetic, Hillaryesque Joan Allen — on world-scanning computer screens. They might be watching a video game......

Allen, Strathairn and the movie�s other middle-age co-stars photograph about 20 years older than they did in their last films; Scott Glenn�s face has the bas-relief road-map look of the aged W.H. Auden. That�s partly to isolate the younger Damon generationally as well as geographically from his handlers, but mainly because Greengrass and cinematographer Oliver Wood are going for a verismo feel.

The director, who last year did the excellent docudrama United 93, has defined his Bourne location work as guerrilla filmmaking — using concealed cameras in "wild" situations — and he overuses the hand-held shaky-cam to shout, visually, that this is all real, man! "You couldn�t make this stuff up," Glenn�s chracter wrily observes, as if the audience doesn�t know it�s watching a spy thriller.....

In Damon, Greengrass has an improbable but plausible Bourne. Moviegoers are so used to seeing Damon smile that he becomes someone else when he relaxes his features. His Bourne is a man of three expressions: going blank, which gives his features the slackness of a new corpse; showing wariness of imminent danger or unmasking, like a naughty schoolboy who realizes he�s being watched; and, an instant later, getting taut, in situations where he expects the worst and tries to be prepared for it.

The strategy is simple but effective. Damon uses the ordinariness of his appearance to help make Bourne invisible to his enemies, a working-class hero to the audience. That�s the secret of this character, and Bond and John McClane and all the other action-movie studs....]


Great stuff but it made me wonder why ? marks were possessively all over the place instead of the ' apostrophes.