6/10 | IMDb | The Bourne Identity | Doug Liman
0/10 | IMDb | The Bourne Supremacy | Paul Greengrass
0/10 | IMDb | The Bourne Ultimatum | Paul Greengrass
My dad maintains that Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity is the best book he's read. I haven't read it but I wouldn't like it because I don't like Robert Ludlum. His books are 2000 words a day of plot, intrigue and violence. Todd pointed out that books I like are the opposite of the movies I like and there's truth to that. I read my dad's books when I was a kid, but only because I liked the idea of reading them. I think what I might have been doing was trying to connect with my dad in some way.
I liked Liman's adaptation of Ludlum's first Bourne novel more than I did any of Ludlum's books. "Identity" is never better than its first third. The amnesiac protagonist (nameless at first) struggles to piece together his titular identity and discovers things that raise only more questions for him. We know he's a secret agent, but the fun is seeing him realise this. In one scene, he's asleep on a park bench, then is suddenly awoken by bothersome police. He dispatches of them with martial arts skills he didn't even know he had, then is dumbstruck by what he's done. The film becomes less interesting once he's more or less pieced together the puzzle, but it doesn't stop being entertaining.
The subsequent two films were garbage in my opinion. There was no need for the camera to be always zooming in and out and waving all around I thought and the cuts were far too frequent (this, coming from a Michael Bay fan!). I gave up on both of them about fifteen minutes in and left them on in the background so I could rate them without feeling guilty. The dialogue and sound effects were good.
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