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July 27, 2004I saw “The Bourne
I saw “The Bourne Supremacy” tonight, and while it certainly deserved to trump “Catwoman,” I was definitely let down. I really enjoyed “The Bourne Identity,” so when I was getting pretty consistent reports from various corners that this was even better than the first movie, I expected to go in this evening and have a grand time.
There was something missing, or muted, or soulless about this installment. Apparently, it bears almost no resemblance to the novel itself, which might be part of the problem. I think I prefer the fiction market method of “write something good, then get paid for it” to the Hollywood method of “make a mediocre film because you have a lot of money to spend and nobody can stop you.” They’ve gone so far off-track from the novels that it doesn’t sound like there’s much hope of them hopping back into Ludlum’s original ideas. Luckily, if they keep it up with the Delirium Tremens School of Camerawork, we’ll never see enough of the subsequent installments to notice where they’ve strayed from the source material.
Everybody’s been complaining about the cinematography, and as much as I hate to have to join the teeming horde on this one, I just couldn’t handle it. In comparison, “The Blair Witch Project” was a Steady-Cam dream filmed by a cameraman who skated along on a thin lair of drawn butter and synovial fluid. It wasn’t just that the camera jittered around during the action sequences (which it did to no end), but that it would persist in doing so during scenes where Matt Damon was just standing still, or talking on the phone. I might as well have been watching a film on an airplane during severe turbulence. The fight scenes were indecipherable, and the much-vaunted car chase was literally painful to watch—and could have taken place on a merry-go-round, for all I could tell.
Franka Potente was a nice breath of Teutonic goodness, though. I’d never seen her with her hair long and blonde before. She should leave it alone. It looked fine enough in “Run Lola Run” and “The Bourne Identity,” but it’s better au naturale.
Posted by patrick at July 27, 2004 01:58 AM
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