The Bourne Tedium

I was in two minds whether to write this post. Having just seen The Bourne Ultimatum, I thought I'd tell anyone who cares (i.e. no-one) what I thought of it. The problem is, it usually takes me a while to work out what I actually think about a film having just seen it.

The reason I write this so soon after is probably related to the palpable feeling of disappointment currently swimming in my gut.

Having enjoyed the first Bourne film, and when the sequel turned out to be even better if anything, I was hugely excited by the prospect of a third entry in the series. Something you should understand too, is that I hardly ever go to the cinema, mainly due to the reality of most films being total dross, and also because even the better ones are rarely worth the £8,000,000 a ticket or whatever they cost now. So it takes something rather special to shake me out of my semi-agoraphobic stupor and drag me to a cinema complex.

But Bourne was definitely a franchise I'd grudgingly put some trousers on for.

Here's the thing; I was kind of... bored. Maybe that's too harsh a way of putting it, but whichever way you say it, that's not a great endorsement for an action movie. It wasn't bad by any means, it just felt like a re-run of the previous films - he still doesn't remember who he was, there's yet another shady CIA ponce after him (with a safe full of evidence that could completely destroy him - doh!), a couple more mute assassins, etc.

Even the obligatory car chase made me wonder if they'd accidentally slipped in a reel from the previous film.

It's worth pointing out that when I first saw GoldenEye at the cinema, I was less than thrilled, mainly due to the fact that virtually EVERY ruddy scene (bar the very end) had been shown endlessly in trailers and clips. But over time (and perhaps helped by the excellent N64 game) it's become one of my favourite Bond films.

I can't say it was the same situation this time though - I deliberately avoided looking at too many trailers or reading lots of reviews - but it's entirely possible I'll revise my opinion upwards as various good bits come back to me in the following weeks.

Interestingly, one of the last films I saw at the cinema was Casino Royale (it would have been the last one, but I saw Die Hard 4.0 the other week, which elicited a more understandable feeling of disappointment), which I enjoyed a lot more, and more immediately, which makes Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass's rather disparaging comments about the Bond franchise even harder to take.

And as for Bourne being more 'realistic', there's just as much techno-bollocks in those films than in Bond.

To be honest though, I think the film may have lost me quite early on at the bit where the (unarmed) British police race to the scene of a shooting at Waterloo station... blowing whistles. I think it's fair to say the security situation in the UK has moved on somewhat since, y'know, the Victorian Age.