The Bourne Ultimatum
A little bit of Identity, a little bit of Supremacy, a bunch of Snowden stuff, and some very supercharged spooks, since this film’s budget is much bigger.
Nearly all these scenes have parallels with previous scenes (including direct quotes), but there’s always a small twist to keep things interesting. Bourne’s car is being T-boned into a concrete divisor, but he slides over it. Nicky is dyeing her hair in her bra while Jason takes a gander, but they keep it professional. Bourne is the one jumping through a window this time. “Look at what they make you give”, but the Treadstone guy who got shot survives. It’s a retread with a wink.
The plot took the thrown together epilogue from the last film and build the whole thing around that, before and after. Pretty nifty way to solve that.
The bad guys don’t get so characterised as the first one, not even David Strathairn can really shine. They are all just bureaucratic buffoons, activating assets, requesting renditions, the whole MinTru lingo. None of their maps gets a chance against the territory inhabited by Bourne (and Nicky also vaults some chest-high walls).
Bourne actually fails a lot here: gets busted on purpose several times, the Guardian guy is dead, gets PTSD every time he sees something resembling his training.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.