Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

A high velocity thriller, The Bourne Supremacy delivers bone-jarring stunts and highly kinetic chase scenes from within an intellectual premise. The human story of Jason Bourne still governs, and while the action is unstoppable, the characters dominate.

CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) runs a dangerous mission in Berlin to try and reveal the identity of a mole within the agency. The mission is disrupted by rogue Russian agent Kirill (Karl Urban) and turns into a disaster for Landy, with two men killed and a fingerprint left behind to implicate Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), the former black ops agent now living off the grid in India. Kirill is working on behalf of Russian oil tycoon Yuri Gretkov (Karel Roden), the beneficiary of $20 million in dirty CIA money. Deputy Director Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) and operations technician Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) join the effort to find and capture Bourne.

Kirill tries to dispatch Bourne but only succeeds in killing his girlfriend Marie (Franka Potente), spurring Bourne back into action. With Landy hot on his trail, Bourne has to clear his name, expose the mole, convince Landy that he had nothing to do with the Berlin killings, and survive Kirill's dogged attempts to eliminate him.

Director Paul Greengrass sprinkles mesmerizing action scenes at all the right moments throughout The Bourne Supremacy, none more effective than a superbly edited and violent car chase through the streets of Moscow. It is difficult to imagine that cinematic car chases can still offer something new, but parking the realities of occupant injuries aside for just a few minutes, Greengrass allows Bourne's taxi to get clattered, swiped and spun around repeatedly and brutally as the chase hurtles towards its climax, Bourne deliberately bouncing his vehicle off other cars and obstacles to abruptly change direction and seize the upper hand.

The other action set-pieces are not as eye-popping, but they are never less than professional.

The dangerous cat and mouse game between Bourne and Landy is managed well, as they take turns in gaining the initiative and gradually build an understanding in a high stakes game where careers and lives are threatened at every decision. Matt Damon puts on his stone face and bulldozes his way through the movie, leaving Joan Allen to play the more expressive Pamela Landy. The barely concealed strain on Allen's face conveys both the risks she is forced to take and the unspoken tension of a woman ordering men around in the most masculine of covert activities.

Franka Potente, Brian Cox and Julia Stiles lend strong support in small but pivotal roles, Cox particularly memorable as the senior CIA presence who has hatched and weathered more conspiracies than he cares to remember.

The Bourne Supremacy mixes all the ingredients of the action genre in almost exactly the right proportions. Some originality may be lacking, but the tried and tested elements are polished to an impressive shine.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Blow (2001)

Based on a true story, Blow recounts the life of George Jung, an American who finagled his way into the burgeoning cocaine importing industry at the height of the Medellin Cartel's infamy. Despite what he may have thought, Jung himself was a small-scale player in a global business, and he was relatively quickly shuffled out of the deck of drug kingpins, landing repeatedly in jail. Blow relies on style and flair to make up for the limited talents of its central character, and Johnny Depp emits irresistible star magnetism.

George Jung (Depp) was born and raised in a working class Massachusetts family, and he has a strong attachment to his dad Fred (Ray Liotta). Fred's strong work ethic does not compensate for the lack of good business skills, and the family ends up bankrupt. In the mid 1960s George moves to California and vows to never be poor or want for anything. He establishes himself as the local beach marijuana supplier for local distributor Derek (Paul Reubens), and quickly graduates to supplying weed to New England campuses, transporting it from California in the unscrutinized luggage of airline stewardesses, including Barbara (Franka Potente), whom he married.

But the law is onto George, and he soon lands in prison, and Barbara succumbs to cancer. George meets Diego behind bars, who convinces him to graduate to cocaine trafficking. Upon his release George travels to Colombia where Diego arranges a meeting with Pablo Escobar, the brutal leader of the Medellin Cartel, emerging as the most powerful drug syndicate in the world. George becomes an importer funnelling Escobar's drugs into the hands of Derek for distribution in the US. But his downfall is already in the works.

Despite a central character who is more a go-between than an instigator, Blow is never less than interesting thanks to Depp's icy but engagingly charismatic performance, and solid support work from the rest of the cast.

Director Ted Demme, working from a script by Nick Cassavetes and David McKenna, amps up the flash factor but also keeps an eye on the human drama by maintaining a running interest in the evolving relationship between George and his father Fred. The massive wealth that George accumulates from the drug trade appears at first to be the son exceeding the father's achievements, only to become a harsh lesson emphasizing the values that Fred tried to impart to his son at an early age, values that George contrived to understand way too late in life.

The film is lacking even a passing reference to the victims of drug addiction who are the end users of George's cocaine business. Blow treats illegal drugs as any other commodity except with a more complex supply chain. If George ever gave a second thought to the misery that he was helping to create in the world, Blow isn't interested to know.

In one of life's many ironies, Demme died in 2002 at age 38, less than a year after Blow was released, of a heart-attack likely aggravated by the cocaine found in his system.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Bourne Identity (2002)

Robert Ludlum's abandoned hero Jason Bourne comes to life in The Bourne Identity, a rousing action film that starts a franchise, with Matt Damon stepping effortlessly into the role and confronting a mess of a broken life with danger around every corner.

Jason Bourne is floating in the Mediterranean Sea, unconscious and with two bullets in his back. Picked up by a fishing trawler, he is helped back to health by the fishing crew, but is suffering total amnesia. The only clue to his identity is embedded in his skin: a tiny laser projector with a Swiss bank account number.

Making his way to Zurich, Bourne finds his safety deposit box: it's filled with a large amount of money in different currencies, multiple fake passports, and a gun. His address appears to be in Paris, but before he can travel, he finds himself being pursued and targeted. Despite remembering nothing, Bourne discovers that he has exceptional combat, surveillance and survival abilities.

He doesn't know it yet, but Bourne is a CIA-trained assassin who has botched a hit against a deposed African dictator. His CIA black-ops unit, headed by Alexander Conklin (Chris Cooper), wants Bourne dead to clean up the mess, and soon a succession of CIA hit-men as well as police authorities from Zurich to Paris are after him. The only help Bourne gets is from Marie (Franka Potente), an unsuspecting US visa applicant who runs into Bourne at the consulate and agrees to drive him across Europe in exchange for $20,000. As his travel companion, Marie soon finds herself as wanted as Bourne, and she has to decide how much to stick around as Bourne tries to find a way to survive, stop the carnage, and confront his former controllers.

Director Doug Liman briskly shepherd the action around Europe and finds the required delicate balance between humanizing Bourne and delivering highly kinetic action, including a terrific Parisian car chase. The film is sharply edited to capture the energy while keeping the action comprehensible, a skill lost in many subsequent action movies.

Damon makes the role of Bourne his own, and although he does not need to stretch, he mixes to great effect the icy coolness of an assassin with the confused anguish of a man who does not know his own name. Germany's Franka Potente holds her own against him, playing the weary Marie, quickly finding out exactly how much trouble is attached to the $20,000 that Bourne gives her. The rest of the cast is somewhat lightweight, but enlivened with relatively small roles for Clive Owen and Julia Stiles.

The Bourne Identity is an enjoyable, intelligent action film, with a compelling central character buffeted by a neverending series of absorbing, if slightly over-the-top, calamities.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.