Finally caught up with the Bourne Ultimatum over the weekend. It's a great ride. Not the sort of movie you want to spend too much time thinking about. Although I give them credit for at least trying to come up with some kind of backstory to explain why Jason Bourne can out-think, out-fight and out-everything the combined staffs of the CIA and NSA. There are two great chase scenes. The Tangiers chase lives up to the Paris chase in the first movie. And the NYC chase is one of the best movie car chases I've seen since Ronin. Special citation should go out to the Bourne movies for providing work for just about every vaguely sinister white guy character actor of a certain age: Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, and Albert Finney. One of the things I like about the Bourne movies is that they have such good acting, even when they don't need to.
More, including some spoilerish stuff below the cut.
Watching the deleted scenes on the DVD, I was struck by how correct the decision to delete all those scenes was. I'm sure Scott Glenn's agent wasn't too happy about that, since pretty much all of his good scenes ended up getting cut. And the movie might have been okay with maybe one or two of the deleted scenes left in. But they all would have served to make the story just screamingly unsubtle. Way too much work from Capt. Obvious and the Obvious Patrol in there. There was one exception -- the scene where Scott Glenn fires Joan Allen. Sure, it adds to the definition of his character as a shifty, two-faced bastard. But it adds a huge chunk of WTF?!? to the story. Why in the hell would they fire her and then assign her to the Bourne investigation? Or rather, why would she take the job? I think it'd be completely obvious to her that she was only there as a scapegoat if they gave her the assignment after Glenn had fired her. Everything you need to know about her relationships with Glenn and Strathairn is communicated much better in that one scene where the two of them meet for breakfast.
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