Bourne Again

Cheap tabloid pun, but I really couldn't resist, given both the brilliance of the film, and the (tangential) link with a minor collapse of my blog's architecture which led to an enforced template reboot.

Bourne 3 is good not for any reason of variation but because it does the same as its predecessors, only more so. Ultimatum represents a point where a formula has been perfected (some deluded fools see the same thing with Goldfinger). Unlike Bond, this is a formula of style rather than content. There's a sense of variety across the three Bournes in terms of plot (as well as a continuity absent from Bond) but all of them dance to the same frantic beat of fast editing, shaky camera-work and washed out filmstock.

Bond never quite had this, indeed no Bond director ever had a 'style' unless one counts Lewis Gilbert's propensity to shoot the same film three times (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker - beautiful foreign spy, mankind directly threatened, climactic battle in enemies gargantuan lair).

It's also interesting as perhaps the most left-wing action series ever. Even Doug Liman (who went on to the profoundly thoughtless Mr and Mrs Smith) cast the CIA as bad guys in a way limited more to the paranoia thrillers of the seventies than contemporary cinema. When villains in mainstream film appear from within institution, usually the institution itself is sound with only a few bad apples blamed for any evil behaviour. By the final reel they've come to a sticky end and the institution is thus purged.

The common thread throughout Bourne has been a melancholy distrust for monolithic agencies, both that they trained Bourne originally and then that they try to rub him out by any means necessary. The second movie is perhaps the weakest in that respect as "bad apples" Brian Cox and Chris Cooper are purged from the institutional memory of the CIA by upstanding Pamela Landley. However Ultimatum is in open revolt against an entire philosophy of government - the "any means necessary" approach of the Bush administration - a philosophy which takes the most drastic action on a whim and without any degree of oversight.

The institution is the villain in Bourne, whether by its attempts to silence a rogue agent in Identity, by its capacity for corruption in Supremacy or by the combination of a broad and vague remit to fight terror with byzantine internal politics in Ultimatum. Some one-off paranoia thrillers have taken this as their central motif, some action films have touched on it in sub plots (Predator, Die Hard) but Bourne takes it as its whole purpose - what if an agent of a profoundly amoral institution suddenly woke up to his role?