THE FAVOURITE (US/UK/Ireland - 2018) Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Cast: Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Nicholas Hoult, Joe Alwyn, James Smith, Mark Gatiss, Jenny Rainsford, Carolyn Saint-Pe. (R, 119 mins) "As it turns out, I'm capable of much unpleasantness." After his controversial 2009 international breakthrough DOGTOOTH, Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos shifted to English-language films but has lost none of his gift for the caustic and the confrontational. Whether it's the Kafka-esque, absurdist nightmare of THE LOBSTER or the bitterly cold Kubrickian chill of THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER, Lanthimos pulls no punches and takes no prisoners, and though he didn't write his latest film, the 18th century period piece THE FAVOURITE, it's very much in his wheelhouse while at the same time being his most commercially accessible work yet. With its setting and its use of natural lighting, it recalls Stanley Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON, and that also extends to its self-serving characters, key among them a core trio of mean girls in an environment of garish opulence that often masks the grotesque, with nearly every bodily function on display at some point. It frequently feels like Jane Austen adapted by Kubrick in a really nasty mood, but Lanthimos takes a much more aggressive technical approach beyond the long Steadicam and tracking shots, often utilizing super wide-angle and fish-eye lenses for conveying the sense of disorienting madness that comes with being enmeshed in the dysfunctional world of Queen Anne, played here by relentlessly busy British TV vet Olivia Colman, in what should be a star-making performance.
It's 1708 and England is at war with France, but a disconnected Anne remains largely isolated in her chamber, uninterested in politics, emotionally needy, depressed, and psychologically unstable, prone to off-the-handle raging and binge-eating. She's widowed and spends her time caring for her 17 rabbits, one for each child she lost through either natural causes, stillbirth, or miscarriage. All of her official business is conducted by her chief adviser and close confidante Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz). Pragmatic, shrewd, and ruthless, Sarah keeps the Queen blissfully ignorant and under her thumb, using the power of the throne and her close access to further her own agenda, which is closely tied to her military general husband, the Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss). As such, Sarah pushes for more war and higher taxes, always getting the Queen to go along with it, much to the chagrin of foppish, ambitious opposition party leader Harley (Nicholas Hoult). Sarah's control over Queen Anne turns unexpectedly precarious with the arrival of Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), her cousin whose own once-noble family fell on hard times, culminating in Abigail's drunkard father losing her in a card game when she was 15, not long before he was killed in a fire. Sarah gets Abigail a job as a lowly scullery maid, but she ends up getting the Queen's attention when her skills with a natural herb remedy prove effective in relieving her chronic pain from gout. Before long, Abigail is spending more time with the Queen as Sarah is gradually frozen out, prompting an increasingly vicious game of one-upmanship between the cousins that doesn't go unnoticed by Her Royal Highness, who revels in the attention and the distraction it provides from her own misery and toxic insecurities.
Much of THE FAVOURITE is a comedy that's dark, bile-soaked and extraordinarily mean. At the same time, the competition that existed between Sarah and Abigail is historically accurate, with Lanthimos and screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara going into specific detail on things that were merely whispered about through history, namely the extent of the relationship between Queen Anne and Sarah, in addition to the psychosexual games the cousins played with the queen, both going to intimate extremes to "service" her, win her favor, and preserve the privilege of power that comes with being by her side. Though it's a film populated by characters doing some truly despicable things, part of what makes THE FAVOURITE so fascinating is how it humanizes each of the three protagonists--not exactly justifying their actions, but certainly revealing qualities that cause seismic shifts in the audience's alliance. The roles are in almost constant flux over the course of the film, as the merciless Sarah, who never steps down from an argument and can cut down anyone and everyone in the room (her lacerating sparring with the pompous and cartoonishly over-dressed Harley--at one point taunting him with "Your mascara's running, would you like to go fix it?" before a nose-to-nose staredown that provokes him into a full-on tantrum--is priceless), becomes increasingly victimized by the scheming machinations of Abigail, who isn't nearly as sweet and innocent as she initially seems. Weisz is matched by Stone, but it takes the entire film to realize the true impact of Colman's performance, letting it simmer to a boil for nearly two hours before a haunting final scene that's hard to shake, especially once Elton John's achingly appropriate, original harpsichord version of "Skyline Pigeon" plays over the closing credits (this is the second Lanthimos project for Weisz and Colman, both of whom were in THE LOBSTER). Beautifully shot, razor-sharp, and unabashedly rude and vulgar (no other film in 2018 throws the C-word around with such wild abandon), THE FAVOURITE is another masterwork from Lanthimos, who has firmly cemented his place in the upper echelon of the world's great contemporary filmmakers.
THE LOBSTER
(Ireland/UK/Greece/France/Netherlands - 2015; US release 2016)
The English-language debut of Greek DOGTOOTH auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, THE LOBSTER is an absurdist, dystopian satire that's equal parts Stanley Kubrick, Lars von Trier, and Franz Kafka. Set in a near future where being romantically unattached is forbidden, college professor David (a schlubby Colin Farrell) is dumped by his wife for another guy. The authorities cuff him and escort him to The Hotel, a government-sanctioned facility where people have 45 days to find their perfect partner or they'll be turned into an animal of their choice. Accompanying David to The Hotel is his dog, who used to be his older brother until he failed to find a partner by the end of his last 45 days. The rules at The Hotel are ironclad and strictly enforced: you must have some similar physical trait with a potential mate, prompting a limping widower (Ben Whishaw)--even those whose spouses have died must report to The Hotel immediately following the funeral--to cause injuries that make his nose bleed when he's attracted to a chronic nosebleeder (Jessica Barden); sexual stimulation can only be provided by dry-humping the maid/sex therapist (Ariane Labed), and masturbation is forbidden, as a lisping man (John C. Reilly) learns when the punishment is having his hand burned in a toaster in front of everyone. The unattached can buy more days by going on daily "Hunts," where they find illegal loners in the surrounding woods and shoot them with tranquilizer guns and bring them back to The Hotel. Down to his seven days, David desperately attempts to bond with The Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), so named because she's the record holder at capturing loners and extending her stay. When that fails, he stages a daring escape and is welcomed into the woods by the Loner leader (Lea Seydoux), where he finds love with a similarly near-sighted woman (Rachel Weisz), only to find that the Loner philosophy is the exact opposite: love is forbidden.
Even that synopsis is just scratching the surface with everything going on in THE LOBSTER. Once out of The Hotel, the story takes some unexpected twists and turns, but Lanthimos also slows it down, and it isn't quite as effective as the absolutely brilliant first hour, which has some of the most bizarre and wildly inventive ideas in any movie this year. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymus Filippou don't clearly lay out the rules of this unnamed society, though the characters themselves are aware and never seem shocked by the insanity of what's their "normal." Instead, they just drop one baffling revelation and rule after another on the audience, making David's predicament both nightmarish and darkly hilarious. It's laugh out loud funny when David turns into a total prick to convince The Heartless Woman that he's her guy, like kicking a little girl in the shin or not lifting a finger to help her when she pretends to be choking as a way to test just how much of a heartless asshole--like her--that he is. The same goes for The Heartless Woman's utterly robotic display of dirty talk ("Do you mind if we fuck in the position where I can see your face?" she asks David as she's bent over, face down on the bed). THE LOBSTER--so named because that's David's choice of animal to be turned into should he not find a partner in 45 days--loses some momentum in the "loner" half of the story, though there's interesting parallels in the way the Loner leader is just as totalitarian and barbaric as the people who run The Hotel (her ultimate revenge on the hotel manager, played by Olivia Colman, is quite good). A love it-or-hate it proposition, THE LOBSTER is a dark, disturbing, and often hysterically funny one-of-a-kind work from a consistently bold and provocative filmmaker (if you haven't seen DOGTOOTH, you need to), and an instant cult classic. I wish the second half was as strong as the first, but this is still one of the year's best films, and one that sticks with you long after it's over. (R, 119 mins)
I AM WRATH
(US - 2016)
Continuing his slide into the netherworld of VOD, John Travolta dons his CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES Big Boy helmet wig for this C-grade JOHN WICK ripoff, playing a seemingly ordinary guy avenging the murder of his wife. Shot and set in Columbus, OH, I AM WRATH has Travolta as Stanley Hall, a former auto plant manager who's jumped by three assailants, one of whom, Charley (Luis Da Silva, Jr) stabs his wife Vivian (Rebecca De Mornay) to death. Vivian was part of an independent team hired by Governor Meserve (Patrick St. Esprit) to verify the state's clean water percentages. Stanley isn't convinced it was a random attack when Charley is apprehended and useless Det. Gibson (Sam Trammell as Not Quite Colin Farrell) shrugs and lets him go with the explanation "Eh, people like him don't last long. He'll O.D. soon enough." Of course, Stanley happens to have been a lethal black-ops mercenary prior to giving that all up for Vivian, so he calls his old buddy Dennis (Christopher Meloni) to track down Charley for him so he can get to the reason Vivian was killed. Gee, is there any chance the corrupt cops are in cahoots with the governor, who didn't like the numbers Vivian turned in, therefore needing her to be silenced? Maybe, considering it's riddled with cliched lines like "This goes all the way to the top."
Written by Paul Sloan (who plays one of the villains), I AM WRATH is the kind of movie that has zero trust in its audience, overexplaining everything and flashing back to past comments as if its simple plot is too complex to follow. It's heavy-handed to the point of self-parody, such as the shot where an enraged Stanley throws a Bible across the room and it lands with the page opened to the Jeremiah passage about "the wrath of the Lord." Gibson is one of the most absurdly and obviously corrupt cops you'll ever see in this kind of movie. There's no subtlety to the direction of Chuck Russell (THE MASK, ERASER), helming his first film since 2002's THE SCORPION KING. Travolta and Russell came onboard late, as the film was originally pitched to Nicolas Cage with William Friedkin (!) set to direct. That would've turned out better than the thoroughly generic film I AM WRATH ended up being. It's so sloppy that it can't even keep the name of its villain straight--in some scenes, he's "Meserve" and in others "Merserve." Travolta has a few scenes where he puts forth some acting effort, though it's pretty obvious that the 62-year-old icon is doubled almost Seagal-style in the the action scenes. The one bright spot in I AM WRATH, which skipped theaters entirely and debuted on VOD, is Meloni, once again busting his hump to salvage a middling, forgettable actioner (though MARAUDERS was a bit better than this). Travolta's just at the "Who gives a shit?" stage of his career, but Meloni throws in enough wiseass asides and bizarre quirks that he's always interesting to watch even when he's just standing there wondering why he ever left LAW & ORDER: SVU. (R, 91 mins) SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER (US - 2016)
The sixth entry in the SNIPER franchise--not counting the misleadingly-titled recent Steven Seagal vehicle SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS--SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER is the third to star the almost-lifelike Chad Michael Collins as Brandon Beckett, son of original SNIPER Thomas Beckett, played by Tom Berenger in the first, second, third, and fifth films. Berenger, who wasn't in the 2011 reboot SNIPER: RELOADED, but returned for 2014's SNIPER: LEGACY, sits this one out, though Billy Zane, who co-starred in the first and fourth films, is back as Sniper Jr's commander Richard Miller. This time, they're on a mission in Eastern Europe, surveilling the Trans-Georgian Pipeline, a terrorist-targeted gas line stretching from Georgia into Europe. All the while, every move they make, coordinated by their commander (when Dennis Haysbert announces "I'll be quarterbacking this from the JSOC office in Turkey," that's straight-to-DVD code for "I'm barely going to be in the rest of this movie") and a civilian contractor/Sniper Jr. love interest (Stephanie Vogt), is anticipated by the nefarious Gazakov (Velislav Pavlov). Gazakov is the "ghost shooter" of the title, a lethal sniper who's able to pinpoint the exact location of the American military team, indicating the operation has a mole or he's been able to hack into their network. It's never really explained how he tracks them, but it hardly makes a difference, as veteran DTV sequel director Don Michael Paul (LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER, JARHEAD 2, TREMORS 5, KINDERGARTEN COP 2) is more focused on firefights, digital blood, and CGI explosions. Collins is as bland as ever, and Zane has little to do other than bark orders and tough-guy jargon ("There is no next time...there's only ONE time!"), while other characters talk like people who've seen too many action movies ("Say hello to my Russian friend!" cackles a Russian liaison as he blows some bad guys away, before telling Sniper Jr "Welcome to the wild, wild east!"). SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER is pretty standard-issue, jingoistic, DTV, shot-in-Bulgaria military porn--with Paul repeatedly letting the camera linger on fetishized shots of empty shells as they spill out of weapons--and offers little that's new or interesting beyond killing 100 minutes. You could do a lot worse, but that doesn't mean you should expect much. (R, 99 mins)
EXPOSED is one of those films with two parallel storylines that finally converge in the closing minutes. In a predominantly Latino neighborhood in NYC, Dominican-born Isabel (Ana de Armas) has a strange hallucination of a levitating albino while waiting for the subway at the very stop where a cop (Danny Hoch) is killed the same night. That dead cop's hard-nosed detective partner is widower and anger-management case Galban (Keanu Reeves), who focuses his investigation on local drug lord Black Jones (Big Daddy Kane). Galban digs deeper, ultimately getting romantically involved with his partner's widow (Mira Sorvino) and uncovering evidence of police corruption and his partner's extracurricular, outside-the-law activities that must involve Isabel or there'd be no movie, and perhaps there shouldn't have been. The chaotic backstory of EXPOSED is far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen. Originally shot as DAUGHTER OF GOD, the film was an indie drama about, among other things, the plight of poor immigrants, violence against women, the lasting trauma of child abuse, and the effects of the war in Afghanistan on the families of those who serve. Making his feature writing/directing debut, Gee Malik Linton lucked into the involvement of Reeves following the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was originally cast as Galban and knew that it was intended to be a small role. Reeves, who became one of 30 credited producers and whose presence helped secure funding and a Lionsgate distribution deal, brought his KNOCK KNOCK co-star de Armas onboard, and all was well until Lionsgate saw Linton's cut.
DAUGHTER OF GOD got positive reaction from test audiences, but Lionsgate insisted they were promised a commercial Keanu Reeves thriller, and no one was going to confuse DAUGHTER OF GOD with POINT BREAK, SPEED, or JOHN WICK. They proceeded to take the film away from Linton, gutting it from 126 minutes to 102, losing much of the cultural elements--most of DAUGHTER OF GOD was in Spanish with English subtitles--and eliminating entire subplots and characters. The biggest change they made was cutting down the screen time of those who remained in the film while keeping everything with Reeves, who signed on for what was to be Hoffman's small supporting role--a big-name actor doing a solid to help out a new indie filmmaker--but was now the co-lead with as much screen time as de Armas. A "source" claimed Reeves supervised the overhaul, first called WISDOM and then changed to the more lurid EXPOSED, though Reeves' rep insisted he had nothing to do with it. Realizing he was fighting a battle he had no chance of winning, Linton successfully petitioned to have his name removed as director, with credit going to Alan Smithee protege "Declan Dale," while remaining credited for his screenplay under his own name. It should go without saying that EXPOSED, in its released form, is almost cataclysmically awful and borderline unwatchable, the logical end result of trying to turn a low-key and largely foreign-language art-house drama into a mainstream cop movie. Disjointed and dull, with fantastic elements that make appearances as random as those of the recognizable character actors in the supporting cast (Christopher McDonald plays Galban's captain, and Michael Rispoli appears a couple of times for some reason), and with the war in Afghanistan and child abuse subplots now looking exploitatively wedged in and quickly abandoned, the film makes no sense at all and more or less just ends in the least satisfying way possible, topped off with the bonus of glacially slow closing credits to inflate the truncated running time by another ten minutes. It's certainly a possibility that Linton's director's cut of DAUGHTER OF GOD is a worthwhile film, though considering he named an inner city, African-American crime lord "Black Jones," one shouldn't be too quick to assume it's a lost masterpiece. Lionsgate dumped EXPOSED on VOD and in as few theaters as contractually required with no publicity at all. Welcome to Hollywood, Gee Malik Linton! (R, 102 mins)
YOUTH
(Italy/France/UK/Switzerland - 2015)
Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returns with a spiritual cousin to his Oscar-winning THE GREAT BEAUTY, set at an almost tomb-like resort in Switzerland. Like the guests, the film never seems to leave that location, at least until the final scene, with the primary focus on two elderly friends, both artists, both feeling the effects of a lifetime of love, loss, regret, and age, with the looming feeling that death is waiting just around the corner. It's a film of much sadness and melancholy, but it's not a depressing downer, and is in fact quite funny at times, even if it's not what US distributor Fox Searchlight seemed to pass off as a GRUMPY OLD MEN for the art-house crowd. Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a legendary composer and conductor, now retired and refusing an offer by an emissary of the Queen to be knighted and to perform his most famous piece, "Simple Songs," at a gala event for the Royal Family. Fred's best friend of 60 years is renowned filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel, in his best role in years), who's working with four young screenwriters on what he intends to be his final masterpiece, his "testament" to a life in cinema. You can already sense the Fellini homages in the form of nude bodies--young, old, toned, and flabby--posed in pools and saunas in an almost still photography fashion, coupled with Visconti shout-outs in the ornate but dreary resort that's still a draw for the jet-set but, like its central characters, has seen better days.
Characters drift in and out of the story--Rachel Weisz is Lena, Fred's daughter and assistant, who's just been dumped by her husband (Ed Stoppard), who happens to be Mick's son; Paul Dano is a Shia LaBeouf-like American actor, deeply focused on his art and working with the most important European filmmakers but unable to escape the fact that everyone knows him from a big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster where he played a robot; and Jane Fonda as an aging, embittered Hollywood legend, star of 11 of Mick's 20 films, who flies all the way from L.A. to Switzerland to tell Mick a lot of things he doesn't want to hear--but Caine's Fred and Keitel's Mick are the foundation. The two icons are magnificent together, whether they're lamenting the inevitability of the end, or reminiscing about a girl they both loved 60 years ago and clearly still think of often (leading to one of Keitel's most unexpectedly poignant scenes). YOUTH can be downbeat (Weisz spits out a devastating monologue where Lena unloads on her father for leaving her mother decades earlier) and cynical (a cinema purist who dedicates the film to Francesco Rosi, Sorrentino doesn't have much use for television), but it's also very funny. Fonda's only in the movie for five minutes, but she makes every second count, whether she's emphatically stating that she had no problem blowing producers to get a foot in the door 50 years ago or telling Mick "Stop licking my ass" when he's overselling how great she looks. Her character is crass and vulgar ("She's only read two books her entire life, and one of them was her autobiography written by a ghost writer," Mick tells Fred), and Fonda plays it to the hilt with very little screen time. Fred and Mick start their days bitching about how they can't piss and are later shocked when they're out on a walk and happen upon to elderly resort visitors screwing up against a tree. Like the classic Italian cinema that Sorrentino adores, YOUTH is artsy and surreal, whether Fred sits in a field of cows conducting a symphony played by their cowbells, or Mick is confronted by all of the heroines from his movies. The most outrageous bit comes from Dano's brooding method actor, prepping a Hitler biopic and deciding to get in character by spending his remaining days at the resort walking around in full Hitler makeup and costume to get the feeling of alienation and being hated, which seems like exactly the kind of idiotic, attention-seeking stunt LaBeouf would pull. YOUTH is a lovely, hypnotic film that deserved more exposure than it got, even though "Simple Songs" got an Oscar nomination, which is odd considering it's an almost sublimely awful composition, perhaps intentionally so. (R, 123 mins)
LEGEND
(US/UK/France - 2015)
Peter Medak's 1990 film THE KRAYS was a mean, tough chronicle of twin British gangster siblings Ronnie and Reggie Kray played by two-years-apart brothers Martin and Gary Kemp, best known as, respectively, the bassist and lead guitarist of the '80s radio staple Spandau Ballet. LEGEND--what a terrible title--is based on John Pearson's book The Profession of Violence, and tells essentially the same story, with Tom Hardy playing both roles. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (PAYBACK), who won an Oscar for his L.A. CONFIDENTIAL screenplay, LEGEND has Hardy turning in two distinctive and vividly exceptional performances as the gay, hot-tempered, paranoid schizophrenic Ronnie and the ostensibly more focused and level-headed Reggie, but one of the key facets of the film is how their personalities eventually cross over to the point where Reggie gets so out of control that an on-his-meds Ronnie is the one who has to calm him down. LEGEND doesn't have much to go on other than Hardy's performances. Helgeland is content to let his star carry the weight of an otherwise rote and routine gangster movie that borrows liberally from Scorsese, right down to a long GOODFELLAS tracking shot when Reggie takes his girlfriend and eventual wife Frances (Emily Browning) to a nightclub, and pissed off British mobsters constantly calling each other "cunts" instead of "jerkoffs." The time element in LEGEND isn't handled very well--we know the Krays ruled London from the late '50s to the late '60s, but the film seems to start in the late '60s and we see their ascent in the nightclub scene after a partnership with Philadelphia-based gangster Angelo Bruno (Chazz Palminteri shows up for a couple of scenes), a top underling of Meyer Lansky. There's conflict with the Krays' cash handler Leslie Payne (David Thewlis) and hapless flunky Jack McVittie (Sam Spruell), whose brutal murder at the hands of an enraged Reggie is what would eventually be the beginning of the end for the Krays, with Reggie sentenced to life in prison in 1967, though he'd get a "compassionate release" in 2000, when he was dying of cancer and had only a few weeks to live (Ronnie would succumb to a fatal heart attack in prison in 1995).
Helgeland sticks to the standard-issue tropes and basics here, with a lot of time spent on Reggie and Frances' crumbling marriage while curiously glossing over Ronnie's relationship with "Mad Teddy" Smith (KINGSMAN's Taron Egerton). He also utilizes the hackneyed device of having the film narrated by a dead character, and even resorts to a sneering Reggie confronting dogged Scotland Yard inspector Nipper Read (Christopher Eccleston) with the obligatory "Ya know, we're not all that different, you and I" speech. Hardy is exponentially more effective as the Krays than the Spandau Ballet siblings were, but THE KRAYS is the overall better film even though it took some liberties with history. THE KRAYS had a vicious and ominously sinister LONG GOOD FRIDAY feel, along with a WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?-esque freakshow of a performance by the great Billie Whitelaw as the Krays' harridan mother, a character who barely figures into LEGEND and mainly just makes a couple of dismissive remarks about how Frances can't make a decent cup of tea. By comparison, LEGEND just feels like an overlong Scorsese retread in a London setting. A much bigger success in the UK than in the US, where its planned nationwide release was busted down to a limited run at the last minute, LEGEND inspired two cheap, Asylum-worthy British knockoffs with this year's THE RISE OF THE KRAYS and THE FALL OF THE KRAYS, as movies about the Krays are apparently to the UK what Coco Chanel biopics are to France. (R, 132 mins)
Directed by Tony Gilroy. Written by Tony Gilroy & Dan Gilroy. Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Joan Allen, Albert Finney, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Oscar Isaac, Zeljko Ivanek, Dennis Boutsikaris, Corey Stoll, Donna Murphy, Elizabeth Marvel, Louis Ozawa Changchien, Paddy Considine. (PG-13, 133 mins)
The films in the Matt Damon-starring BOURNE trilogy are arguably the most highly-regarded action films of the last decade. As entertaining as 2002's THE BOURNE IDENTITY was, it wasn't until 2004's THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, which found director Paul Greengrass taking over for IDENTITY's Doug Liman, that the series really hit its stride. The sense of handheld immediacy that Greengrass brought to his breakthrough film BLOODY SUNDAY (2002) translated beautifully to complex chase sequences that, for better or worse, changed the way action films were constructed and clearly influenced how the makers of 2006's CASINO ROYALE approached reinventing James Bond. That said, Greengrass' techniques aren't easy to imitate effectively, and a lot of action films that have followed in the wake of SUPREMACY and 2007's THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM fell--and continue to fall--victim to hyper-edited, overly-frenetic shaky-cam that renders a lot of the action incomprehensible and headache-inducing. A lot of people cite Greengrass as the culprit for the action shaky-cam phenomenon, but that's like blaming Quentin Tarantino for all the RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION ripoffs that flooded video stores in the 1990s. It's not Greengrass' fault that he's great at what he does and other filmmakers aren't.
Which brings us to the hybrid reboot/parallel story THE BOURNE LEGACY, which takes its title from a post-Robert Ludlum Bourne novel by Eric Van Lustbader, but doesn't use Lustbader's novel as a source. Greengrass and Damon are out, and in their stead are Tony Gilroy and compulsive franchise-joiner Jeremy Renner (following his work in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL and THE AVENGERS). Taking place at the same time as THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, LEGACY deals with the effects of that film's Treadstone and Blackbriar debacles on Outcome, a top-secret NSA project run by Col. Byer (Edward Norton) and Adm. Turso (Stacy Keach). When the Jason Bourne story is leaked by the British reporter (Paddy Considine) killed in ULTIMATUM, and a YouTube video surfaces showing Treadstone head Dr. Hirsch (Albert Finney) toasting a top Outcome doc at a birthday dinner, Byer and Turso panic and decide to terminate their Outcome agents to erase any connections between them and the CIA, Treadstone, or Blackbriar. They believe they've gotten rid of all their agents, but one--Aaron Cross (Renner)--is in the Alaskan wilderness and manages to fool them into thinking he's dead. Cross is hooked on blue and green pills--provided by Outcome doctors--that enhance his intelligence and combat skills. He's dangerously low on both and without consistent dosage, those vital skills nosedive. Outcome's goal was to genetically alter average agents and turn them into espionage supermen. Making his way back to D.C., Cross eventually joins forces with Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), who's also being targeted by Outcome for knowing too much about the terminated operation.
Gilroy wrote or co-wrote the three previous BOURNE outings, and on paper, promoting him to director seemed like a win-win. He knows the franchise and in the meantime, got an Oscar nomination for his directorial debut with 2007's MICHAEL CLAYTON. But neither MICHAEL CLAYTON nor Gilroy's follow-up, the romantic spy comedy DUPLICITY, were big on intense action, and Gilroy is a writer first. As a result, THE BOURNE LEGACY has a lot of exposition that borders on incoherence, and there's entirely too much chronic overexplaining where the more people talk, the less sense things make. What happens in a lot of THE BOURNE LEGACY is that Gilroy the director couldn't part with anything Gilroy the writer had on the page. There's several instances of deflated tension when characters just talk and talk and talk. That works in character-driven pieces like MICHAEL CLAYTON, but in something like a BOURNE film, it's a momentum killer. Renner and Weisz are fine in the leads, and AMERICAN HISTORY X stars Norton and Keach (it's nice to see him on the big screen again) make formidable villains until Gilroy gives them nothing more to do but pace around in their "crisis suite," staring at monitors, gritting their teeth, and barking into speakerphones where their dialogue is essentially reduced to "Where the hell is he?!", "That's him/her!", "We need to contain this!" and "Find Aaron Cross!" The only thing that's missing is a scene where Norton stands at his office window overlooking D.C., and scans the horizon before gravely intoning "Where are you?"
Too much of THE BOURNE LEGACY just feels like a bland retread, right down to the climactic motorcycle/car chase through the streets of Manila. Gilroy really drops the ball here, shooting the extended chase as more or less a series of close-ups of the actors. It's a maddeningly incoherent blur of an action sequence that ends up being another unsatisfying attempt at mimicking Greengrass' techniques. Cross and Marta are being chased on a motorcycle by a crazed, nameless killing machine (Louis Ozawa Changchien) dispatched by Outcome, and the big payoff is executed with a terrible, video-gamey CGI effect that induced chuckles instead of "Whoa!"'s from the audience. Bourne faced some memorably lethal assassins in earlier films--The Professor (Clive Owen) in IDENTITY, Kirill (Karl Urban) in SUPREMACY, and Paz (Edgar Ramirez) in ULTIMATUM, but Gilroy can't even be bothered to give Changchien a name, dialogue, or character traits, instead opting to just drop him into the film 110 minutes in, just so there's someone to pursue them for the by now obligatory big chase.
THE BOURNE LEGACY has one of the best casts of the year, but you wouldn't know it by how badly Gilroy wastes most of it. Past BOURNE co-stars appear in blink-and-you'll-miss-them walk-ons that aren't even enough to be called cameos: Finney's entire role consists a blurry YouTube clip lasting 15 seconds tops and he appears in a photo later. David Strathairn has two brief scenes, and one of them is lifted from ULTIMATUM; Scott Glenn as CIA head Ezra Kramer has a short conversation with Keach at the beginning and is gone by the five-minute mark; Joan Allen, so terrific in SUPREMACY and ULTIMATUM, returns as CIA deputy director/scapegoat Pam Landy, appearing just past the 120-minute mark and shown exiting a courthouse and getting into a car, with one line of dialogue. And an uncredited Considine's two brief shots appear to be from ULTIMATUM. I realize these characters are here to establish a bridge between ULTIMATUM and LEGACY and to illustrate that they're taking place simultaneously, but why assemble that accomplished a cast and give them absolutely nothing to do? It's so rare to see the great Albert Finney these days that one can't help but be a little disappointed to find him promimently-billed and getting less screen time than the actual Bela Lugosi in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
And why not just recast the Bourne role if Damon wanted to move on? Why create "Aaron Cross" in the first place? Have Renner play Bourne and base it one of Lustbader's novels instead of creating some hokey new plot about pharmaceutically-enhanced spies. There was an element of drama and suspense to the amnesia-stricken Jason Bourne. Aaron Cross is just after some pills. Are Gilroy and Universal thinking a few films ahead? Are they anticipating Damon returning to the series? Or will Bourne return and team up with Cross at some point? Or better yet, two films from now, will it be revealed that Cross and Bourne are the same person? With the BOURNE alumni walk-ons and the creation of a new character, there were times in THE BOURNE LEGACY where it started to resemble Blake Edwards trying to keep the PINK PANTHER series going without Peter Sellers. And there you have it: THE BOURNE LEGACY is to the BOURNE franchise what CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER was to that series. That's not a knock on Jeremy Renner, but rather, on the questionable decisions made by the filmmakers. Passably entertaining at times, lots of returning faces to establish familiarity and sell us on this new model, but it's a decidedly inferior product that pales in comparison to its predecessors. In trying to continue the BOURNE series, the filmmakers have ended up making what amounts to an uninspired imitation.
