Wait a minute, I seem to remember something like 90% of the first movie was shakycam photography as well. So is it even shakier this time around? What kind of number would you use if you tried to quantify it? 20% shakier? 30?
I thought it was great, but the shaky closeup quickcuts destroyed the great fights and chases, leaving only Bourne’s spy awesomeness. Which was really awesome. Bonus points for [spoiler] 10 minutes into the movie. Ballsy move.
I thought it was great, even if Franka was tragically underused.
I didn’t mind the shakeycam, it was intended to disorrient you. To highlight the fact that most of us can barely tell what’s happening, while Jason has thought up a plan and put it into motion. Before we know which way is up the outcome is a forgone conclusion.
Sure, there weren’t as many fights, but really, we saw Bourne break out the lighting quick disarming and disabling skills so many times in the first movie that it was kinda over. The chases were great, I love every great escape. And the last chase had me so cuaght up, I cheered with its conclusion!
At the very least, a safer be than Catwoman.
Agree with most of the comments made about this film. The fight and car chases were too confusing, except the first fight scene.
Don’t want to give too much away, but they didn’t capitalize on the things that made Identity such a good movie. Technology, mysterious kickass Trendstone operatives, Julia Stiles, car chases that actually held a shot longer than 2 seconds, etc.
I think it still has legs as a franchise.
Joan Allen was pretty nice looking for an older lady.
Overall I thought it was pretty decent.
Spoilers
What did you think of his confession to the daughter at the end. That was just bizarre. “Sorry I killed your mom and dad. I had to change my plan. I had meant to only kill your dad.” Sheesh. Gimmie a break.
He meant only to kill the dad, but he changed his plan and made it look like her mom killed her dad, which presumably did all kinds of psychological damage.
[SPOILERZ!!!]
I think the scene at the end was pretty much the point of the movie. Right before the bullet kills Marie, she tells Borne that he does have a choice. He makes the choice, but the movie doesn’t make that clear until we realize why he’s coming to Moscow: not to avenge Marie’s death, but to do what he can to make amends for his past. Throughout the movie, we’re never really sure what he’s up to, how or whether he’s grieving, what he’s doing to come to terms with her death. Is Jason Borne an emotionless assassin? Is he a single-minded revenge machine? Is Matt Damon just a bad actor? It’s not clear until we realize where he’s going in the end and why he’s going there.
That Borne also manages to also kill the man who killed Marie – because he’s a cop! – is this weird inadvertent bit of kismet.
[/SPOILERZ]
I thought this was a pretty important nuance that was just another example of how smart the Borne movies are. I loved it and it’s easily the best thing I’ve seen this summer.
As for the camerawork, I didn’t mind, although I do understand the objections. But I think this is partly why the director, Paul Greengrass, was chosen. You guys should rent Bloody Sunday, where you get a sense for how he uses long lenses, handheld camera work, and quick cuts for emotional effect. He uses these tricks not to hide sloppy choreography or performances (Bloody Sunday has some really elaborate crowd scenes), but to further the pacing.
In Borne Supremacy, consider the early scene with Marie sorting through Jason’s notes, intercut with Jason running on the beach, and the arrival of the Russian assassin. The sense of menace and foreboding was largely in the editing.
For me, the car chase in Moscow ranks in the top ten car chases of all time, not only because it’s a great latter day example of what Friedkin did with The French Connection – the car chase as an expression of the state of mind of your characters, with an emphasis on their faces, while the banged up cars are an extension of their psychology – but also because it was done with practical effects rather than digital trickery (I’m pretty sure that’s the case, although I have to wonder about that shot from inside the taxicab with Matt Damon in the frame while the car slams into the side of a truck!). There was phenomenal stunt work going on there and some really amazing violent wrecks and driving.
-TomMore spoiler…
I agree that the last scene is the point of the movie, and I even get the point. I am just saying the way it was written was sloppy and left much to be desired.
How much peace of mind can the man who actually killed your mother and father offer you? Put yourself in that girl’s shoes for a minute. How do you feel?
Maybe if they would have allowed the girl to become emotional and toss him out, spit on him. But she can’t do any of that because he breaks into her apartment and has a gun in his fist.
No, that scene was just bizarre.
Girl to Bourne: Oh, so you were just going to kill dad, but mom got in the way? I see. I understand. That makes me feel so much relief.
Maybe in the next movie Bourne and the daughter can get together for some hot sex?
Are you guys really this retarded? He didn’t go there because he thought she’d want to know the guy who killed her parents, he went there because for most of her life she thought her mom fucking killed her dad and blew herself away. Why don’t you just think about the psychological repurcussions of such a tragedy, and then think about how it might feel if you learned that it was a lie and your mom didn’t go batshit insane and how maybe it wasn’t your fault after all? Christ, when something goes over your guys’ heads, it gets some goddamn air!
He didn’t go there because he thought she’d want to know the guy who killed her parents, he went there because for most of her life she thought her mom fucking killed her dad and blew herself away.
His motive isn’t the problem.
when something goes over your guys’ heads, it gets some goddamn air!
Him breaking into her house with a gun to say he murdered both her parents is better than her just believing her mom killed her dad? Do me a favor and don’t buy me any birthday presents. It’s like saying forget about those old psychological repurcussions, but do try on these new psychological repurcussions and see how they feel. My word. Am I the only one who noticed this?
Bourne might have made her afraid of the dark, but the aparant method of her parents’ death could have made her incabable of having anything approaching a healthy relationship.
I loved it. Finally a summer action movie for grownups. The theater I went to was packed, mainly with adults. I loved how this movie doesn’t have to resort to gawdawful amounts of crummy CGI. I loved how this movie felt like a travelogue of a summer vacation (India, Germany, the UK, Italy, Moscow!) I loved how Jason Bourne just flicks a switch in his head and turns into a complete and total badass. I loved how he improvised that gas explosion without hesistation by just jamming the magazine in the toaster. I loved how it never felt like the screenwriter had to dumb everything down by having everythign explained (this usually happens in a movie when some character has to “translate” everything into “plain english” for some other character, usually an innocent caught up in the action.)
That final chase scene was complete and total badass. I actually flinched with that shot of the cars just about to intersect the freeway. (That’s the shot right before that nifty closeup of Matt Damon driving and a car slams into the side of the car.)
And yeah, the entire point of the daughter business was to make some sort of amends, as weird as it may seem. But I noticed that in the scenes of the girl coming home, I couldn’t help but feel a sadness about her. Her parents had been killed years before. Judging from the old lady who Bourne asks early in the Moscow scenes, it looks like she had to vacate their old place. She was living in some crappy projects. And she moved in a weary sort of way.
Bourne has that line, “I know what it’s like having someone you love taken from you,” which of course refers to Marie. But at least the girl now knows that her parents were murdered (yes, by him), so yeah, she can hate him for it. But at least she won’t blame her mother anymore. Her parents were victims of an assassin. But her family didn’t self-destruct.
I’ll never forget the day that bloodied, American murderer broke into my house and told me the truth about killing my mom and dad. God bless him; I can love again.
They needed to find another way for him to let her know the truth without having him show up in her apartment and tell her. But other than that and the shaky cam, it was an OK movie.
Tim, you’re being a total baby about this. Why don’t you just admit you forgot that she thought her mom annihilated the family, and stop carrying on like this?
Now one is saying this is a magical Christmas moment for her, but for God sakes, like Jason said, I’d want to know.
Yeah, this is all good. And you could go on to say that he feels so strongly about the truth because he spent the last two movies searching for his own truth. Still, he seems to be capable of empathy so I don’t know why he’d think it would be a good idea to show up at this girl’s house the way he did. It’s just a bizarre scene.
The worst part is we don’t need this scene to figure out he’s trying to make good choices like Marie said. We know this is what he’s up to when he refuses to kill the old CIA guy because he tells us as much. When the reveal comes that he’s looking for the daughter in Russia, it’s somewhat satisfying but it would have been much better if he would have found a different way to let her know.
Also, I did get lost in a few places. How did the first exCIA guy that he strangled know he was coming? Bourne appears in exCIA guy’s apartment and he’s surprised and caught with an unloaded weapon. But then he tells Bourne he’s “called it in” and the team is on the way.
Actually, the German Treadstone agent kept a pistol in his fridge (apparently for just such an emergency). Bourne unloaded the ammo in it and put it back.
I imagine that the German guy had some kind of telltale mark to detect if someone, say, opened his front door while he was at work. Or maybe he noticed a scratch on the lock consistent with the lockpicking device the FBI (and Bourne) uses, or something like that. Or maybe it’s that, like Bourne, he seems to have heightened awareness and just had that “sixth sense” that someone was there.
And he called it in when he entered the code to disarm his alarm. He probably has multiple codes. A “everything normal” one, as well as a “come fucking quick, there’s someone in the house but I don’t want to alarm them that I know” code.
What is the preferable alternative? Should he have called in a dedication to a radio station?
“You’re listening to 1080, the Kow. Moscow’s choice for smooth listening. There’s a very special Neski girl out there, and the assassin who killed her parents would like her to know that he’s the reason they’re dead. This one’s for you…” Cue Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues.
Or maybe he can be her pen pal!
"Dear little girl whose parents I killed,
"Regretfully I must inform you that your parents did not die as you thought they did. I was doing a job and things went bad, so I killed them both.
"Mybad,
“Jason Bourne Esquire.”
It’s like breaking up after so many dates, you gotta do it in person. Breaking in a waiting for her to come home lends gravidy and credibility to his claims. Oh, and assassins aren’t social workers. They aren’t trained to break things to people easily.
As for the camerawork, I didn’t mind, although I do understand the objections… He uses these tricks not to hide sloppy choreography or performances (Bloody Sunday has some really elaborate crowd scenes), but to further the pacing.
Supremacy has a few of the qualities that made Identity great - most notably the absence of obvious cgi, a hero who isn’t a smirking ironist, and a refreshingly serious tone. But the camerawork is a real deal breaker for me. Greenglass has the awful idea to combine a cinema verite style shaky-cam with the ulta-fast cuts of Michael Bay and then top it all off with the blurriness and arbitrary zooms made famous by the Super-8 birthday party school of filmmaking. At some point he got the even awfuler idea to film pretty much the whole movie like that.
I’ll take your word for it that he’s not using this style to hide sloppy coreography or performances. Unfortunately, though, by definition it also hides great coreography. Compare Identity’s fist fight (in Bourne’s apartment) to Supremacy’s fist fight (in the treadstone agent’s apartment). Did your brain just give you a divide by zero error? That’s because it’s impossible to compare the two. Identity’s fight is lucid and thrilling and features a truly shocking moment of intimate violence. Supremacy’s marque fight is a three minute vibrating blur with “thwap” noises.
The good news is that if jiggling incomprehension works for you, you could probably rehabilitate a lot of crappy movies. My advice is mount your TV on a paint shaker and revisit Minority Report.
*-edited for spelling