Forty years ago, I saw a film by Jonas Mekas, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The movie consisted of tiny snippets of super 8 film edited together to make a dizzying montage -- faces, bits of weather, parties, buildings, everything cut together as mere glimpses, each picture passing in the blink of an eye. I recall that the film was interesting at first, but, ultimately, exhausting and tedious: the eidetic (remembered) image impressed upon the eye conflicted with each new transient image and, ultimately, my recollection of the film is that of a chaos, a cloud of impressions never settling into any thematic or narrative coherence. Paul Greengrass' big-budget action film, Jason Bourne, applies Mekas' technique to a violent international thriller. For a half-hour or so, the film is grimly effective. But, in the end, the picture is merely exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive.
Everything in Jason Bourne proceeds at a hysterical, helter-skelter, breakneck speed. Greengrass is credited as director but, in fact, the film's most noteworthy achievement is Christoper Rouse's editing -- Rouse actually manages to develop something that periodically looks like a narrative from this vortex of quarter-second and half-second shots. Although the movie's action sequences are just blurs of action, a fist-fight comprised of sixty or seventy separate shots, the audience has an impression, faint and imperfect, but, nonetheless, an impression of what is going on -- of course, the standard action-movie pleasures of tracking graceful action across an articulated landscape or background are entirely absent in this movie, but you can figure out approximately what is happening. The beauties of choreographed action sequences are not only withheld by this style of film-making but, also, most of the other pleasures that a suspense thriller offers: there's no acting since a performance atomized into a thousand half-second shots doesn't require anything but posing; the dialogue is sub-literate when you can hear it and there is nothing resembling suspense: the audience doesn't have time to catch its breath let alone develop any empathy for the characters. Near the end of the film, Jason Bourne encounters his nemesis, Tommy Lee Jones -- for an instant, the frenetic cutting slows to, maybe, a shot every two seconds. In one of those two second images, the camera portentously moves forward pulling close to Tommy Lee Jones' haggard features -- in the context of all of this chaotic, half-second imagery (without any camera motion other than the wobble of the hand-held camera), the sudden zoom or dolly inward to Jones' face feels as archaic as an image from an early silent film: for an instant, we feel like we are in a conventional movie and, suddenly, the banality and aggressive idiocy of the whole enterprise breaks through the cocoon of the picture's wall-to-wall action.
Jason Bourne is an elaborate chase movie from first frame to last. The problem is that the chase just keeps getting repeated. The bad guys and Jason Bourne (with his doomed female helper) first convene for a chase through Athens -- this is the best sequence in the film because the audience has not yet been sated by the non-stop action. Bourne and the bad guy, Vincent Cassel, zoom around in the Greek capitol where everyone is throwing Molotov cocktails off rooftops -- the whole thing is a pyromaniac's delight and fairly exciting. The characters, next, get together to reprise their first chase in Berlin -- this is just more of the same without the streetfighting and bonfires. Then, the female lead persuades her boss, Tommy Lee Jones, that she needs to meet face-to-face with Bourne in London -- so she joins the bad guys, their henchmen, the corrupt CIA officials, and Jason Bourne for a chase through that city. Again, it's just more of the same. The whole party, then, adjourns to Las Vegas, where Tommy Lee Jones and his bodyguard now join the conclave and everything just repeats in that city. After Tommy Lee Jones gets killed, there's a wholly pointless coda involving a high-speed chase through Las Vegas that makes no sense and, then, a brutal fist-fight in which the hero gets a rubber band twisted around his neck before killing his adversary, somehow, with what looks like a large paper-clip. By this point, the audience has long since ceased to care about who is killing whom. Throughout the picture, I kept worrying about when the characters had time to visit the rest-room -- although Bourne slaughters a few bad guys in a toilet somewhere no one seems to have time to even urinate in this festival of slaughter. People are continuously sending one another texts to the effect of "Let's meet at XYZ place in ten minutes" -- a location always at least fifteen minute hike (five minute high-speed chase) away. I kept hoping someone would say: "I have to go to the bathroom first -- can we make it twenty minutes?" In one scene, Bourne gets off a plane at Berlin, takes a cab, and goes to a shabby, industrial looking neighborhood -- it's about a two minutes scene rendered cubistically into 45 shots or more: fragmentary glimpses of street people, odd images partly occluded by poles as if someone were spying on the action, dizzying POV images, street vistas from cranes, shots taken from street surveillance cameras, jagged handheld tracking shots. The episode delivers a hysterical charge, but, in effect, it's completely meaningless -- we don't need one shot, let alone 45 to get Bourne from the airport downtown; the director could have just cut from the airport to Bourne entering the Berlin warehouse where the next fight will occur. Somehow, the film manages to seem both overstuffed with action, yet, also packed with entirely meaningless padding.
The hero is played by either Brad Pitt or Matt Damon -- I can't recall which.
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