Saw The Bourne Identity (thanks Chris!) It was a spy thriller. I kept thinking it would be better as a show. The film has this generic, eternal feel to it. The film follows amnesiac spy (apparently named) Jason Bourne as he tries to recover his own slippery identity. Once it becomes clear that he's alive and not following his protocol, his handlers summon up "every" agent in the field to bring him down. It's not clear which three-letter agency is behind this, but there's men in business suits and american flag lapel pins who snarl about the "situation" and "messes." So we have an infinite supply of assassins on Jason's tail, a giant bag full of clues to unravel, piece by piece over the course of several seasons, inscrutably shadowy political machinations all set in the foreign-but-not-too-foreign rural Western Europe. Not a bad idea for a show.
Instead the film feels like a series of carefully loosened threads being abruptly tied up just before the end. The body of the film is full of long and luxurious car chases and montages of oh-so-subtle handoffs and men in suits hastily assembling guns and pretty women in high-tech switchboard rooms. It's all very timeless and pleasant but things seem to get resolved very suddenly. A five-minute shootout scene moves into a captured spy regurgitating a page worth of exposition. Shouldn't this spy choke out a name and address, leading Jason to the home of an old granny who is actually a retired spy-handler, who will give lead him to a Chinese bookie and then be shot herself? The point of the film is clearly in the action sequences, which is fine, but we have a lot of plot to get through and it feels uneven to me.
Then again, this is the first film is a series, so perhaps it's only natural that it feels a bit exposition-heavy. In any case spy films are not really my cup of tea and this one was not exceptional enough to overcome that boundary for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment