Movies of the Week
The Bourne Ultimatum, Becoming Jane
See it or skip it? The week's new releases By David Balzer
The Bourne Ultimatum
There’s not much to say about The Bourne Ultimatum that hasn’t already been said about its predecessors: it’s an entertaining, fairly sophisticated piece of mainstream cinema. The film picks up where The Bourne Supremacy, also directed by Paul Greengrass, left off, but in execution feels more like the first film; its purpose being to act as a coda for Bourne and the franchise thus far (this may be the end of Bourne’s quest for his identity, but it’s not the end of Bourne—expect more sequels). There’s a determined effort here to be clearer and maybe even less intellectual; expertly edited white-knuckle chase sequences abound, and Matt Damon’s Bourne seems more invincible and Marvel-made than ever (a single chase sequence has him surviving a bomb explosion, hot-wiring a couple of motorbikes, sustaining a jump from multiple storeys, crashing straight through a window, and killing someone with his bare hands, all within minutes). Ultimatum also effectively reiterates, with conviction and more than a drop of self-righteous schmaltz, the thesis of the franchise, which has always set it above the contemporary action-thriller pack: that the CIA is an elite, ultra-nefarious terrorist organization. And, more interestingly, that it is through violence, abetted by technology—specifically, screens of all kinds: computer, video, movie—that most Americans get to see and understand the world. SEE IT NOW
The Bourne Ultimatum is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.), Silvercity Yorkdale (3401 Dufferin St.), the Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St. W.) and others.
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