FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/13/2007
New in Theaters – “The Bourne Ultimatum"
With more than 3,600 Americans dead in Iraq – exceeding even the death toll from 9/11 – and Muslim maniacs everywhere gazing longingly at skyscrapers, Hollywood keeps telling us the only thing we have to fear is our own government.
In action films, more Americans are killed by the C.I.A., or a rogue operation thereof, than Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, airborne Saudis and every other jihadist outfit in the world – by a factor of 100.
Hollywood (America’s paranoia factory) would have us believe the real enemy is here at home – homicidal patriots who control our government and its intelligence agencies, murder Americans right and left (well, mostly left) and conspire to abolish civil liberties and usher in a national security dictatorship.
That’s the message of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” the third screen outing of Matt Damon as Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne. “Ultimatum” was preceded by “The Bourne Identity” and “The Bourne Supremacy” and will be followed by “The Bourne Rebuttal,” “The Bourne Obsession” and “The Bourne Inanity.”
Having foiled attempts by the agency he once worked for to terminate him with extreme prejudice, like a supercharged pinball, Bourne bounces from Moscow to London to Madrid to Tangiers to Manhattan in search of his memory and true identity – as well as to wreck bloody vengeance on the Agency’s hierarchy that turned him into Secret Assassin Man (They’ve Taken Away His Memory And Given Him A License to Bore).
Like the first two installments, only more so, there are the standard car crashes (where everyone else dies or sustains serious injuries except Jason) and hand-to-hand combat to the death sequences. Just for variety, there are also moped chases and sprints across the rooftops of Tangiers as Bourne attempts to elude the local constabulary and “assets” trying to put him in a body bag.
All the while, poor Jason is having flashbacks to his initial conditioning at the hands of a CIA shrink (a miscast Albert Finney) who apparently erased Bourne’s memory, and turned him into a lean, mean killing-machine, by repeatedly dunking his head (covered with a black sack) in water. Or, maybe they made him watch a Koran being flushed.
Critics who are raving about the action sequences are confusing exhilarating with nauseating.
There’s a once-was/might-be-again romantic interest, Nicky Parsons (played by the exquisite Julia Stiles), the CIA heavies – David Straithairn (whose car has a bumper-sticker that says “Think Whacking”) and Scott Glenn (who lives by the words “plausible deniability”) – and good gal Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) the foil for all of the Agency’s rotten, corrupt killers.
“The Bourne Ultimatum” contains such memorable exchanges as when an incredulous Allen asks a grimacing Straithairn, “We don’t kill Americans, do we?” to which the latter grimly replies, “If we have to.”
It probably took Damon minutes to memorize his lines. He has so few. The puppet version of himself in “Team America” (“I’m M-a-t-t Damon”) delivered his line with more emotion.
Interesting coincidences: 1) The C.I.A. villains both had Biblical names (Noah Vosen and Ezra Kramer) – a religious right allusion? 2) The reporter who tries to help Bourne in the opening of the film writes for the Guardian (the Brit equivalent of the The Huffington Post). 3) Damon grew up next-door to and was mentored by Marxist scholar Howard Zinn. The actor alludes to Zinn’s opus “A People’s History of The United States” (“This book will knock you on your ass!”) in “Good Will Hunting.”
Like the fictional Jason Bourne, Hollywood seeks to condition us. (“Forget terrorists! C.I.A. bad! Kill C.I.A.!”) Instead of dunking our heads under water, this conditioning consists of thousands of hours in a darkened room as images of car crashes flash across the screen.
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