Guys, WTFF is the deal with everyone thinking the Bourne movies are any good? We just caught Bourne 2 or whatever on TNT -- where it's played, like, every other hour -- and seriously: they're handsomely mounted and all, but how can any film series be considered good when you can be ten minutes in and have NO FUCKING IDEA which one you're watching? It's like they only had four ideas for scenes in the whole six hours of screentime:
1) Exposition of the plot, generally characterized by earpieces and Bourne going "Do you know what you've done?" or "Do you know what they'd do?" or "Do you know what I've done?" And someone does.
2) Middle-aged people and Julia Stiles going "Where is Bourne?"
3) Hectic, longass, implausibly survived fight and/or car crash
4) The hired killer who says nothing and makes us kind of sad for him says nothing and makes us kind of sad for him
... and that's basically it, over and over and over in that shakycam, gunsteel blue until BAM, cue the Moby. Is that really enough for supposed movie greatness? Frenzied yet burnished interchangability? Fuck that. We hate movies where everyone looks the same and talks the same AND it doesn't matter what's going on AND everyone's a doublecrosser AND it's all supposed to be so serious and worldly but it's actually just vague. Oooh, we're in Moscow; oooh, we're in Tangier; oooh, we're in India -- but there's nothing actually in these movies about Russia, about Morocco, about South Asia. Oooh, we're the CIA; oooh, we're the Russian Secret Police -- but there's nothing there about actual international espionage other than old white guys are douches, you can use a rolled-up magazine in a knife fight, and the CIA looks a lot like CNN headquarters. Does anyone not remember The Pretender? It's the same goddamn thing but with more money and talent and a serious, "realistic" tone that we find as suffocating as we do laughable.
We had high hopes for this series when it first started, in part because we had heard that it was going to be a kind of backpacker-as-spy type thing, which was a great twist on the old tropes and would have been a great post-9/11 character to explore. But then they got rid of the most backpacker-y part of the series at the beginning of Supremacy (no spoiler here), and gave in to the very slick, very shallow, very dumb potentials of the set-up: he's swimming in cash, he stays at the best hotels, he's got all the equipment he ever needs and knows how to get it without being caught, 'cause he never gets caught unless he wants to... Ho hum. It's the Superman problem: if you can't hurt the guy, how can you make us care about him?
More importantly: it's the James Bond problem. We know, the "JB" thing is supposed to be a riff on Commander Bond. Ha ha. Has anyone else noticed that these movies basically are Bond movies as done by Dick Wolf? Law and Order: International Assassin Unit, where the characters barely have any arc, the acting is reserved, and the tone is deathly serious despite the decidedlly TV-level machinations of the plot. "What did you people do to my brain???" Bong bong. Also: blecch.
(And dude, an aside: we don't know where Bourne shops, but since he dresses just like every other young hired gun in the series, you'd think that all those guys could save a lot of time by just offing each other in the black t-shirt aisle. Just a thought.)
By the way, this is not a thing about how much we hate Matt Damon or Paul Greengrass or Tony Gilroy or Doug Limon, because we don't. Frankly, we feel good about Greengrass and Gilroy cashing any paycheck they can, because they're really great filmmakers. (Bloody Sunday, guys; Bloody Freaking Sunday.) We're just officially and peremptorally announcing our boycott of the fourth Bourne enterprise, which is apparently on the way -- which we will only be repealing if it's called The Bourne Condominium and details Jason Bourne's attempt to settle down and buy an apartment with no credit history in the cutthroat world of New York real estate. At least then there'd be something for us to relate to.