Tag: Paul Greengrass

Jason Bourne

JasonBournePosterThe first Jason Bourne movie came out in 2002, with star Matt Damon still a fairly young man of his early ‘30s. 14 years and a James Bond revival later, it’d be easy to forget how strong that original franchise was. And if you figure that about just as much time has passed in the movie’s timeline since the end of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” you’d think the CIA might’ve all but forgotten about Bourne as well.

And yet here we are in “Jason Bourne” with another set of CIA operatives chasing him down and trying to bury the past as they whisper his name in hushed astonishment. Now it’s Oscar winner Alicia Vikander’s turn to learn she “has no idea who you’re dealing with.”

Bourne (Damon) has been out of the game for years, lifelessly bare knuckle brawling in underground fights, but when his old colleague Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) ropes him back in, it turns out Bourne is still very much the priority of the current CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, who has played the gruff, sarcastic cop and secret agent so many times it’s amazing he wasn’t in this franchise earlier). Continue reading “Jason Bourne”

Captain Phillips

“Captain Phillips” is a shrewd thriller about leadership and respect more so than action and bullets.

Armed Somali pirates have just boarded the Maersk Alabama. The leader of the group, a skinny pirate named Muse (Barkhad Abdi), announces to Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) that this is just business and “Every-ting will be OK.” But when Muse demands to see Phillips’s hidden crew by threatening to shoot someone, something really interesting happens.

“I thought you were a businessman! Is this how you do business?” In another movie, that trigger gets pulled. But in Paul Greengrass’s “Captain Phillips”, the clever routine of shrewd negotiation, strategy and respect continues. “Captain Phillips” is a pulse-pounding thriller, but it’s a film about leadership more so than action and bullets.

Phillips was a real shipping captain whose boat was hijacked by pirates in 2009. The film opens with Phillips saying a tough goodbye to his wife (Catherine Keener) as he leaves for his voyage around the coast of Africa. They talk of the tough job market for their son and how tough the American way has become.

It’s a feeling Muse knows all too well. His commute involves him trudging to the ocean at the behest of gun-toting warlords. He’s allowed to pick his crew from a crop of dozens, but his real options are awfully limited. Continue reading “Captain Phillips”

The Bourne Legacy

After four movies in the Jason Bourne franchise, the only real thing we need to know about Treadstone is that it’s bad, it’s embarrassing to the American government and it’s a PR nightmare that needs to be erased.

So why do we need “The Bourne Legacy” to tediously fill in the details in the same dry, gritty, copycat style as though it were 2+ hours of deleted footage from the Bourne trilogy?

“The Bourne Legacy” is an absurd film bogged down with an endless arsenal of uninteresting characters, pseudo-science jargon and strictly serious attitudes. It’s about as ridiculous as a Bond film but hardly any fun. Continue reading “The Bourne Legacy”

United 93

 

Anyone who thinks it’s too soon to discuss the events of 9/11 has not seen “United 93.” They will accuse it of exploiting the greatest tragedy in American history for the purposes of entertainment, but what they do not know is that this is a masterpiece of filmmaking and a bombshell of the true nature of humanity.

Paul Greengrass’s work on “United 93” pays an honorable tribute to the heroic people killed in the hijacked plane that did not reach its target by staying strictly truthful to the source material. What is seen is not dramatized or exaggerated. It is a reenactment of the day’s events, based on actual conversations from the plane and on the ground, all in real time. Watch it, and try not to be awestruck by the might of this film. To not be is to snub the valiant efforts of the people on board. Continue reading “United 93”