The Bourne Ultimatum was the movie I spent all summer waiting to see. The Bourne Identity, the first movie in the Bourne Trilogy, was the greatest action movie I have ever seen, and The Bourne Supremacy was a worthy follow-up. Both movies featured intense action, innovative use of technology for spy and chase sequences, and solid plots that had nothing to do with the books they were based on.

This diversion from the books is often a sticking point for me. In the Lord of the Rings movies, for example, I hated the little plot additions where Gollum pits Frodo against Sam and where Faramir comes this close to turning Frodo and Sam over to Denethor. I still don’t understand why they took Tom Bombadil out of the movies, either. But in the Bourne trilogy it makes more sense: the head-games and disguises that work so well in the books would not have translated all that well to the screen, and the plot was a bit too convoluted to allow for the kind of visceral experience a good action movie aspires to.

So instead of trying to follow the books and failing the writers decided to take the core of the story and turn it into something of their own. They succeeded wonderfully.

And so on to a brief review of The Bourne Ultimatum. I’ll discuss a few things I loved about the movie, and a few things that disappointed, and then give it a rating out of five bunnies.

Things I Liked:
…Pretty much everything.

The violence didn’t take place for no reason. Throughout the movie Bourne is fighting to defend himself and to protect an ideal. Killing was something Bourne wanted to avoid; see the encounter between Bourne and the “asset” near the end as an example. Too many movies these days glorify violence for its own sake without doing enough to portray a meaningful deeper theme (*cough cough* 300).

The ways Bourne used simple objects to perform awesome tricks was incredibly entertaining. The fan in the apartment scene made me gape like a little fanboy (no pun intended).

The relationship between Jason and Nikki didn’t turn into an unnecessary romance. This was one of the greatest downfalls of Shooter, an otherwise similar and fairly decent movie. In Shooter the male and female leads, as in so many other movies, fall in love and get some heavy makeout time on camera. It’s a needless diversion from the plot and isn’t really very believeable, so it distracts from the flow and the feel of the movie. In The Bourne Ultimatum, however, Jason and Nikki share something significant and don’t feel the need to take each other’s clothes off to deal with it. I strongly respect the writers for avoiding that cliché and keeping the movie’s integrity intact.

Things I Didn’t Like:
To be honest, I can’t think of anything. The plot got a little obscure at the end, I guess. The timeline of the movie was a bit confusing.

Conclusion:
Overall, I give this movie four-and-a-half bunnies out of five. I enjoyed it so much I might even preorder the DVD to complete my Bourne collection. Identity was slightly better, but Ultimatum outdid Supremacy and had me dancing around the Exit hallway with pretend handguns going “Pew pew!” and laughing maniacally, and any movie that can do that to me deserves a high rating.

(By the way, has anyone ever noticed how many trilogies follow the “1 was better than 3 was better than 2″ pattern? See Star Wars (both trilogies) and, arguably, Lord of the Rings.)

I watched The Departed a couple of days ago and decided to give it a bit of a review.

Things I Liked:
I loved the way the movie made use of music to set the tone and mood of the scene. This is obviously nothing new; a movie without mood music is either incredibly bland or absurdly experimental. But The Departed took it up a notch. Several times the music would be playing and then it would cut out entirely, without a traditional fade or scene change or any other punctuation. This really caught my attention, when it happened, and accented the shifting thoughts or surprises of the plot as it happened. I thought it was great.

The plot itself was pretty great, too. It was believable, it was surprising at the right times, and it set the stage for some great characters.

In fact, I think the characters of the movie were its strongest asset. I had mixed attractions to every main character in the movie, and that’s a great thing because it means the movie has depth and meaning to it. I wanted to see Matt Damon’s character get caught, but I also wanted to see if he could somehow escape from the trap he had set for himself. I wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to have a mental breakdown and do something crazy, but I also wanted him to outsmart everyone else in the movie (he got a 1400 on his SATs, after all) and own them all. I wanted Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to yell at people more and get in trouble for it, but then I wanted him to whip out a trump card of some sort and be the ultimate good guy. I even wanted Costello (Jack Nicholson) to either bust out a shotgun and own some face or turn out to be a good guy.

Things I Didn’t Like:
The outrageous overuse of the F-word and other profanities was a mild annoyance. I’m ok with it on a certain level, because it made the characters more believable in this context and made all of the confrontations and emotional shouting matches that much more intense, but I think it could have been toned back just a bit. It bordered on gratuitous, at some points.

The sex scene in the middle was also unnecessary. There’s a difference between being suggestive and being crude, in my opinion. There didn’t need to be as much skin as there was. Actually, I don’t think it was even necessary to sexualize the relationship between those two characters at all. It was obvious they were attracted to each other, but the whole cheating aspect and the intercourse didn’t really further the plot, in my opinion.

Finally, though the ending was very entertaining, it was a bit silly, a bit ambiguous, and a bit of a cop-out. (That was totally a pun, wasnt it?) The “fourth man in” in the climactic scene was barely in the movie at all, up until that point. There were also a couple of loose ends. What happened with the envelope? Why didn’t Matt Damon’s girlfriend answer him from inside the room when he was knocking? What did she do after that? What was Dignam’s ultimate motivation in the final scene?

Conclusion:
Overall, I give this movie four-and-a-half bunnies out of five. It’s worth watching, and very entertaining. The plot is excellent, minus a few tiny holes, the cinematography is great, and the acting is high quality. If graphic violence or constant swearing bother you, however, I’d stay away.