Jason Bourne

Now I remember ... I'm pre-Batman Bruce Wayne

Grade: B

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles and  Riz Ahmed

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

After Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass spent years denying interest in making another Jason Bourne movie, it’s worth pointing out that Jason Bourne is the first in the spy film series for which each has a producer credit. For all their critical accolades, Bourne is their go-to cash cow, much like Tom Cruise and his Mission: Impossible film franchise.

Jason Bourne is the fifth Bourne film and the fourth starring Damon in the titular role of the somehow still amnesiac ubër-agent. Those who enjoy the series’ pulsating vibe, particularly Greengrass’ two entries—The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, will find plenty of  throwback fun in revisiting this milieu after nine years off-screen. Anyone looking for new material will have to settle for a greatest hits set.

Living a nomadic life off the grid as a street fighter, Bourne is lured out of hiding by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the ubiquitous CIA field operative now turned freedom-of-information fighter. Parsons has unearthed secrets about a new black ops program code named Ironhand, along with, naturally, more details about Bourne’s true background.

Even though the sense of discovery regarding Bourne’s past was already teased out over three films, those trademark memory flashes start to flicker, careening Bourne into an opening act that cribs Bourne Supremacy’s intro. This time, Bourne wants to get to the bottom of the shadowy circumstances surrounding the death of his actual father. Do we find out in the next sequel that Bourne’s mother was named Martha?

The most taut part of Jason Bourne is the labyrinthian cat-and-mouse games of spy versus spy. Young, ambitious CIA analyst Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) believes she can lure Bourne back into the fold. Skeptical CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) instead wants to Take Out Bourne™, aided by an agency assassin (Vincent Cassel) with his own axe to grind.

This sequel’s search for topicality lands in the post-Edward Snowden era, as Dewey is also trying to strongarm his way through the backdoor of a Facebook-like social media platform named Deep Dream. But the tech giant’s head, Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), has privacy and stockholder reservations, and he’s is threatening to expose Dewey nefarious role in the surveillance industrial complex.

It’s hard to decide which is shakier, Greengrass’ camera-in-a-blender or Vikander’s American accent. The elaborate action set pieces are capped by a punishing chase sequence through the Vegas Strip. But the bombast is also punctuated by visual grace notes—the bullet wounds in Bourne’s back call back to the 2002 original film; Bourne casually discards a ball cap to blend into a crowd; a spy recorder he lifts from a tech expo that doesn’t resurface until the denouement.

There’s a sense of self-parody afoot. Just as it wouldn’t be a James Bond film without girls and vodka martinis, it wouldn’t be Jason Bourne without the umteenth sight of CIA agents glaring at monitors while barking two-word orders. But while Greengrass and Damon try to adapt Bourne for current events, it’s high time to advance the Bourne character beyond the hunted spy still hunting for his true self. Jason Bourne knows his identity—it’s time for the Bourne movies to update theirs.

Captain Phillips

Yes, officer, I swear we have the

correct number of life preservers

Grade: A–

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali and Michael Chernus

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 14 min.

While driving to his local Vermont airport early in Captain Phillips, the titular merchant mariner (Tom Hanks), bound for Oman and a freighter voyage around the treacherous Horn of Africa, chats with his wife Andrea (Catherine Keener) about how the world is changing and “different” from the one they’re used to.

On its face, this observation is an obvious—ham-handed, even—effort to evoke the post-9/11 anxiety that has fueled not just U.S. foreign policy in the past decade but also the terrorism-themed films of director Paul Greengrass (United 93, Bloody Sunday, and The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum). Yet, piracy is as ancient as seafaring itself. The Vikings were pirates, after all, and in Africa, piracy dates to at least the 16th century, when Barbary corsairs plundered European ships and enslaved prisoners.

And when four Somali pirates hijack Phillips' boat, the Maersk Alabama, the interlopers deny political motives. "We not al-Qaida," declares Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi), the rail-thin leader of the Somali band, on two separate occasions. "This just business," he continues with a tone meant to convey only qualified reassurance. The pirates cheer when they discover the hijacked vessel is U.S.-flagged, but for financial rather than political reasons.

Beyond being a story about Phillips' personal courage, Captain Phillips is Greengrass' rejection of the myopic, one-size-fits-all depiction of contemporary terrorism. At the same time, Greengrass deconstructs Hollywood's romanticized treatment of piracy that dates back to the silent film era. There's no Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster to swing in and dazzle audiences. Even the film's title is a riff on cinematic swashbucklers from Captain Blood to Captain Jack Sparrow. That changing world Phillips references turns out to be an artistic one.

In its place is a standoff between an average American with his frightened, unarmed crew and the desperate Somalis who must capture a lucrative ransom or face brutal consequences from their warlord minders back home.

Greengrass largely stills his trademark camera-in-a-blender, which allows his visual acuity to take center stage. He effectively conveys a detailed sense of space, from the claustrophobia of a tiny lifeboat to the labyrinth of the Alabama's engine room to the mammoth undertaking of four raiders in a skiff seizing a 500-foot container ship.

There are two captains at the center of Captain Phillips. Phillips is a fastidious micromanager slighted by his unionized crew until danger comes calling. Few actors can play resolute and vulnerable as well as Tom Hanks, and the movie universe is better with him in roles and performances like this, his best in at least a decade. And, among the outstanding quartet of first-time Somali actors, Abdi steals more than one scene as Muse, a dead-eyed mercenary who is both savvy yet in over his head.

Even as Captain Phillips' final act devolves into a coldly efficient procedural, Greengrass finds a way to puncture the air of inevitability. A closing cathartic, guttural moment from Hanks leaves you wondering whether Phillips’ emotional scars will ever fully heal. You also wonder whether Muse’s fate was just plan B. At one point, Phillips asks Muse whether there's more to life than being a fisherman who kidnaps people. Muse responds: "Maybe in America."

The Bourne Legacy

"Why didn't I get to play The Hulk in The Avengers...Answer me!"

Grade: B –
Director: Tony Gilroy
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, and Stacy Keach
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

A rogue secret agent shoving a tracking device down a wolf’s gullet to mislead a missile-armed predator drone is a scene that sounds awesome even on paper. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of those adrenaline rushes in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth installment in the movie spy series.

Relentless early cross-cutting reveals that events in this sequel take place concurrent with those in the last Bourne film. With Jason Bourne on the loose and running amok (Matt Damon doesn’t appear, but his photograph does several times, curiously), the CIA decides to terminate other black ops programs, including their chemically-enhanced field agents. When Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) escapes a drone attack, he circles the globe looking for Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a geneticist with access to the chems and viral cultures needed to keep Cross super fit and focused.

Whereas the original Bourne trilogy was a modern-day Frankenstein story—a mind-altered monster searching for a creator now trying to destroy his creation—this reprise is about a junkie jonesing for his pills and a vial of liquid detox. Little else really happens aside from Cross and Shearing dodging repeated efforts to, you guessed it, eliminate them.

Still, consider me a sucker for jut-jawed bureaucrats—played here by Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Dennis Boutsikaris, Scott Glenn and others—barking urgently to “cut off all loose ends” and “minimize the damage.” Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), who adapted the screenplays for the preceding three Bourne films, assumes the series’ directorial reigns from Paul Greengrass. The consequence is an increased predilection for dialogue and labyrinthine plot lines and less for kinetic action. The film has its breathless moments: a workplace shooting massacre is cruelly captivating, while a climactic car-and-motorcycle chase through the streets of Manila is exciting if haphazardly shot. And while Renner doesn’t possess Damon’s magnetism, he grittily fills his predecessor’s shoes.

As a standalone, The Bourne Legacy is an engaging spy thriller. As the inheritor of the Bourne mantle, however, it’s merely an adequate continuum…until and if Damon and Greengrass decide to jump back in.

Neil Morris

The Ghost Writer

Investigating a possible war criminal?
There's an app for that.

Grade: A –

Director: Roman Polanski

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkerson, and Olivia Williams

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Roman Polanski continues to use the silver screen to both explicate and exorcise his personal demons. From surviving Nazi persecution as a child in the Kraków ghetto to the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family to his conviction – and subsequent flight from sentencing – for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski’s real-life travails have informed and defined his film oeuvre.

Reportedly, Polanski had to complete editing of The Ghost Writer from the confines of a jail cell and then under house arrest at his Swiss chalet as he fights extradition back to the United States. In his grand return to the modern thriller (his first since 1988’s Frantic), a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), finds himself living as a virtual exile in a foreign land, partly to escape prosecution for legitimate charges nonetheless brought in a kangaroo court by accusers with duplicitous motives. Sound familiar? There is a lot more than a Napoleon complex going on in Polanski’s mind when Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), compares her husband’s hermetic life on a windswept patch of Martha’s Vineyard to Bonaparte’s banishment to the island of St. Helena.

That other unique and proverbial Polanski archetype – the inquisitive, self-assured loner who foolhardily believes he has a grasp on matters that are actually well beyond his comprehension – comes in the form of a nameless author credited as “The Ghost” (Ewan McGregor), hired as a replacement ghostwriter for Lang’s memoirs after the original scribe met an untimely death.

Lang is under investigation for sanctioning war crimes while in office, chiefly acts of rendition against terrorist suspects, and this premise propels the ghostwriter’s eventual efforts to connect the dots between his predecessor’s demise and the high-stakes political intrigue at play. It is worth comparing Polanski’s use of current events to Green Zone, Paul Greengrass’ polemical Iraq War actioner. Greengrass created fictitious characters and a plot whose unrealized purpose was to elucidate its real-life backdrop. By contrast, Polanski shrewdly exploits a topical controversy solely to service a fictional storyline, in the same way the real battle over water rights in California was mere window-dressing for the personal mystery and psychological drama at the center of Polanski’s Chinatown.

The Ghost Writer thrives on atmospherics, artistry, and acting. Polanski’s skills as a visual virtuoso remain in fine form. He brackets Ghost Writer with silent images portending unseen deaths – the first a shot of an abandoned car sitting alone on a ferry boat intercut with a body washed ashore bobbing in the surf; the last the sublime sight of hundreds of pieces of paper gradually being blown into view as they progressively litter a city street. In between, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Harris – adapting his own novel, The Ghost – fashion a plot that is both morose and pulpy. Accented by Alexandre Desplat’s haunting, orchestral score, Polanski constructs set pieces so tense and finely tuned that they would be labeled “Hitchcockian” if this was any other director.

McGregor reclaims much of his lost luster, ably supplying his role with the right blend of self-assuredness and vulnerability. Brosnan plays Lang as a cross between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, while Williams is mesmerizing as the emotionally bruised but politically savvy first lady (shades of Hilary?). There are also sharp supporting turns from Kim Cattrall as Lang’s longtime assistant (and perhaps more), Timothy Hutton, James Belushi, Eli Wallach, and Tom Wilkinson as one of Lang’s shadowy acquaintances.

But the real star is Polanski. Whatever his personal travails, he remains a master filmmaker. And, neo-noirs like The Ghost Writer are not only his distinctive wheelhouse, but also a welcome throwback to clever, taut political-conspiracy thrillers. This is the old stuff…this is the good stuff.

Neil Morris

Green Zone

Aim for the cameraman!

Grade: C

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, and Amy Ryan

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Everything in Green Zone is punctuated with exclamation points. The Iraq War is LOUD! The Middle East is DANGEROUS! Helicopters, jeeps, and sprinting soldiers move FAST! No one, not even your friends and allies, can be TRUSTED! It’s not so much an adrenaline-rush as a steroid-transfusion.

Unfortunately, if you want in-depth analysis of the film’s gravamen—the quixotic hunt for weapons of mass destruction—the best you will get is Army warrant officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) repeatedly screaming variations on “Where are the WMDs!” or “Tell me about the WMDs!”

Although a good movie can and should be made that investigates the political misinformation used to justify the war in Iraq, Green Zone, which was shot more than two years ago, feels like a dated political drama grounded in theatrics and buzzwords. The film’s in-your-face sense of urgency now seems strangely passé—it may as well be about feverously hunting for leprechauns or trying to uncover Iraq’s stockpiles of pixie dust.

Paul Greengrass, director of the latter two Bourne movies, sets the action in the spring of 2003, between the end of the initial invasion phase of the war and the formal establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority. What could have been a sweeping indictment of the way the United States bungled the formative stages Operation Iraqi Freedom is instead a reductive, fictionalized potboiler regarding Miller’s one-man mission to ferret out the truth about the covert, purportedly reliable intelligence about Iraq’s weapons program being spoon-fed to the whole world.

Along his road to going rogue, Miller encounters of host of half-written ciphers, each trying to extract information from him to further their own aims—at one point, Miller’s backpack was weighted down more by business cards than MREs. Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is a Paul Bremer-esque Pentagon hack carrying the water for his neocon minders. Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson, wearing a five-day growth and constipated scowl) is the CIA bureau chief who calls bullshit on the supposedly sound intelligence regarding the presence of WMDs. And, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) is a Wall Street Journal reporter—and Judith Miller doppelganger—who, having helped Poundstone propound his warmongering propaganda, is now suspicious of him and his clandestine informant who goes by the code name “Magellan."

In Greengrass’ brilliant, affecting United 93, the director enlarged a single, incendiary incident into a broader canvas to create a taut, authentic and comprehensive portrait of the Sept. 11 attack. By contrast, screenwriter Brian Helgeland (still running off the fumes of L.A. Confidential) distills the disreputable underpinning for the war and all its complexities into a flurried chase to track down one Saddam general or commandeer one little black book.

Green Zone is credited as having been inspired by Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, the 2006 book by Washington Post war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran. However, in place of the novel’s sardonic juxtaposition between the gilded, Oz-like bubble encasing the Green Zone and the social and ethnic tumult brewing outside its gilded gates, Greengrass fashions an action-thriller in which sound, fury and his camera-in-a-blender camouflage the narrative shortcomings of a revisionist fantasy in which one man uncovers and exposes the lies that led us to war. Instead, in terms of tone and relevance, Green Zone needed more Dr. Strangelove and less Jason Bourne.

Neil Morris

*Orginally published at www.indyweek.com

Best Films of the Decade: 2000-2009

by Neil Morris

Ever since Moses brought down the stone tablets from atop Mount Sinai, people have gravitated to the Top 10 list. Perhaps no entity – aside from David Letterman – has utilized this olden construct more than film critics, who each year employ it to apply one last stamp of (dis)approval to the world of cinema.

Once every decade, however, we enjoy the rare treat of reaching back in time to not only rehash the best films of – you guessed it – the last ten years, but also reassess the way films have improved or withered with age.

In compiling my roster of the ten best films during 2000-2009, I looked back at the annual top 10 lists I began formally assembling in 2002, the year I began writing movie reviews. For starters, my top two films of the decade were released before then, and nothing I have seen during the ensuing seven years of critiquing films threatened their place atop my list.

Moreover, of all the films I declared at the time to the best of their respective years, only five merited a spot among the decade’s top ten. Over time, a number of films have grown in my estimation, while others have not matured as well, each for a variety of reasons. That is the wonder of cinema: the way a film speaks to you evolves due to personal and societal changes.

So, I commend to you – and your Netflix queue – my choices for the best films of the last decade. See you in another ten years!

Best film of the decade: Requiem for a Dream – Director Darren Aronofsky took Hubert Selby’s book about drug addiction and created a kinetic, transcendent masterwork about loss and unfulfilled promise. A trendsetter, including both visually and for Clint Mansell’s relentless score, this gut-punch of a film – more than any other this decade – advanced the medium of cinema.

2. Memento – Christopher Nolan’s best film remains this hypnotic thriller/character study, not his otherwise superb Batman entries. More than a structural gimmick, this is sublime cinema that combines indie inventiveness with populist moviemaking, resulting in a neo-film noir that is made better by its narrative loose ends.

3. The Pixar canon – Besides saving and revolutionizing the waning animated movie genre, Pixar’s sterling film collection stayed enjoyable to viewers of all ages while managing to mature with its audience. Consider this: 7-year old kids who started off watching Toy Story back in 1995 became the 15-year olds diving into the underwater Finding Nemo, 16-year olds flying away with The Incredibles, 19-year olds escaping into the world of a Parisian kitchen in Ratatouille, 20-year olds captivated by the futuristic WALL-E, and today’s 21-year olds floating away to far-off adventure in Up.

4. There Will Be Blood – Part Citizen Kane, part Stanley Kubrick, director P.T. Anderson’s tour de force speaks to the valor and iniquity of American individualism, and also encapsulates the longstanding feud between capitalism and orthodox religion. Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of oilman Daniel Plainview is arguably the defining film performance of the decade.

5. United 93 – The most emotionally affecting film experience of the decade. Five years after September 11, 2001, director Paul Greengrass accomplishes the unthinkable: a technically proficient rendering that horrible day that manages to honor the departed, praise the heroes, explicate and damn the villains, and skewer the bureaucratic morass that paralyzed our governmental institutions. It is not only an exacting post-mortem on the day our world stood still, but also a celebration of the better angels of our nature.

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Far and away, the most underrated film of the decade. Director Andrew Dominik – backed by a haunting score and gorgeous cinematography from the indomitable Roger Deakins – composes a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on celebrity and the concept of hero-worship, a longing gaze on the sepia-soaked days of yesteryear refracted into a piercing commentary on our con

temporary culture.

7. Munich – Critics have lashed Stephen Spielberg’s most provocative film with every strap of iniquity – amoral; pro-Jewish; anti-Israel; pro-Arab; anti-American; misogynistic; an act of appeasement; etc. These contrasting labels are integral to Spielberg’s complex portrait of Israel’s reaction to the murder of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and, by extension, America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. The film is designed not to advocate, but equally critique the sons of both Isaac and Ishmael.

8. The Bourne trilogy – This is the authoritative movie series of the decade (not Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or the Star Wars prequels), along with being the most exhilarating, intelligent additions to the indispensable action-thriller lineage.

9. Traffic – Using several interconnected storylines, Steven Soderbergh conjured a sprawling, multi-faceted examination of the war on drugs from viewpoints both macro and personal. This is filmmaking at its most epic and informative.

10. City of God – The beauty of this film, set amidst the favelas of Rio De Janeiro, can be found in its narrative scope and visual poetry. Director Fernando Meirelles crafts a gritty, powerful saga that is as poignant as it is brutal.

Best of the Rest: Children of Men; The Wrestler; King Kong; Friday Night Lights; The Aviator; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2; The Queen; Slumdog Millionaire; About Schmidt; Gangs of New York; Million Dollar Baby; 21 Grams; Whale Rider; Infernal Affairs; The Pianist; House of Flying Daggers; Batman Begins; The Dark Knight; Bridgett Jones’s Diary