The Bourne Ultimatum | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical poster |
|
Directed by | Paul Greengrass |
Produced by | Patrick Crowley Frank Marshall |
Written by | Screenplay: Tony Gilroy Scott Z. Burns George Nolfi Tom Stoppard(uncredited) Story: Tony Gilroy Novel: Robert Ludlum |
Starring | Matt Damon Julia Stiles David Strathairn Scott Glenn Paddy Considine Edgar Ramirez With Joan Allen And Albert Finney |
Music by | John Powell |
Cinematography | Oliver Wood |
Editing by | Christopher Rouse |
Distributed by | Universal Studios |
Release date(s) | United States: August 3, 2007 United Kingdom: August 16, 2007 |
Running time | 111 min |
Country | United States United Kingdom |
Language | English French Russian Arabic Spanish |
Budget | $110 Million |
Gross revenue | $442,911,572 (worldwide) |
Preceded by | The Bourne Supremacy |
Followed by | Bourne 4 |
The Bourne Ultimatum is a 2007 spy film directed by Paul Greengrass and loosely based[1] on the Robert Ludlum novel of the same name. The film is a sequel to The Bourne Supremacy and the third film of the Bourne Series. It stars Matt Damon reprising his role as Ludlum's signature character, amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne. The film continues the saga of Jason Bourne as he escapes from authorities in Moscow, Russia, and follows the character as he travels to Paris, London, Madrid, Tangier, and New York City to uncover his real identity, while the CIA continues to send assassins after him.
The Bourne Ultimatum was produced by Universal Pictures and was released on August 3, 2007 in North America, where it grossed $69.2 million in ticket sales in its first weekend of release, making it the highest August opening in the U.S.[2] Although all three films have been commercially successful and critically acclaimed, The Bourne Ultimatum is the only film in the trilogy to have been nominated for an Academy Award, winning all three of its nominations for Best Film Editing, Best Sound, and Best Sound Editing at the 80th Academy Awards.
Contents |
The movie begins before the end of the events in The Bourne Supremacy, as Bourne, wounded by a gunshot from the Russian assassin Kirill, is still evading the Moscow police. Cornered by two officers while breaking into a medical clinic to treat his wounds, Bourne overpowers the officers, knocking one out, while holding the second at gunpoint. He leaves them alive as he escapes, saying, My argument is not with you.
Six weeks later, Simon Ross, a security correspondent for The Guardian, meets with Neal Daniels, the Madrid CIA station chief, in Turin, to discuss Treadstone. Bourne goes to Paris to tell Marie's brother, Martin, of her death, then heads to London. He then arranges to meet Ross in London at the south entrance of Waterloo Station. Ross, however, is under surveillance because his use of the word "Operation Blackbriar" in a phone call to his editor was tracked by ECHELON, alerting the CIA. CIA section chief Noah Vosen alerts his staff at the Anti-Terrorism Deep Cover in New York to find out any information on Ross, believing that Operation Blackbriar has been compromised.
After receiving a call from Bourne, Ross takes a taxi to Waterloo Station. At the station, Bourne sees CIA officers following Ross and places a prepaid mobile phone on him; through it, Bourne instructs him how to dodge the station's surveillance. However, Vosen orders an assassin, Paz, to kill Ross and his source. Vosen's team identifies Bourne on a security camera and recognizes him as the original Treadstone assassin, and assumes he is Ross's source. While Paz gets into position with a sniper rifle, Bourne tells Ross to remain hidden, but Ross panics and steps out into the open, giving Paz a clear kill shot. In the chaos, Bourne grabs Ross's notes which reveal Ross' source as Daniels.
Deputy Director Pamela Landy is asked to help capture Bourne. With Landy's help, Vosen and his team determine that Daniels is Ross' source. They send a team to Daniels' office in Madrid, but Bourne arrives first, finding one photograph in an otherwise empty safe as Daniels has already left. Bourne attacks the CIA team members when they enter the office. Right after Bourne secures the room, Nicky Parsons then enters it unexpectedly. Nicky tells him that she was reassigned to Madrid after Berlin, and that Daniels has fled to Tangier. She helps him escape the CIA reinforcements by telling Vosen that Bourne had already left the office. Her motivation for helping Bourne isn't entirely clear, but it is subtly implied that before he lost his memory, they had been in a relationship. While in Tangier, they realize the CIA has sent assassin Desh Bouksani to eliminate Daniels. Nicky uses her official clearance access to send Desh a message, telling him to meet her for a new phone, thus allowing Bourne to follow Desh to his target. When Vosen realizes Nicky's deceit he orders Desh to kill Nicky and Bourne after terminating Daniels. Landy is outraged at Vosen's willingness to indiscriminately kill CIA personnel and quits the operation.
Bourne follows Desh and is unable to save Daniels, who dies from Desh's planted bomb. When Desh returns for Nicky, Bourne outruns the Tangier police and attacks Desh, who is temporarily able to withstand Bourne's withering onslaught, eventually strangling him. Bourne has Nicky code in the fact that the both of them are dead to give each of them a head start at disappearing. Bourne then puts Nicky on a bus with the advice that, "It gets easier." (Referring to blending in and disappearing). At the Tangier morgue, Bourne examines Daniels' charred papers and finds the address of the CIA substation in New York City. Bourne takes a flight to New York City, and on arrival deliberately uses a passport that alerts Landy to his presence. Bourne calls Landy while observing her and Vosen from across the street. Bourne sends a text message to Landy to arrange a meeting. Vosen and his team intercept the message and follow Landy as she leaves the building. However, the meeting is simply a diversion to allow him to enter Vosen's office and steal classified Blackbriar documents.
Vosen recognizes the diversion too late after receiving a phone call from Bourne to get a recording of his voice, which is one of the keys to unlocking his Blackbriar safe. Bourne reveals he is in Vosen's office, and Vosen frantically orders CIA officers back to his office to capture Bourne. Bourne escapes and enters into a car chase with CIA officers and Paz. Just outside the Treadstone facility, Bourne meets Landy and gives her the stolen documents from Vosen's office before entering the building. On his way back to his office, Vosen eventually works out that Landy gave Bourne an address in code when Landy gave Bourne his date of birth. Vosen races to the facility where Landy finishes faxing away the Blackbriar document that Bourne stole to the FBI. She looks at Vosen and says, "You better get yourself a good lawyer." Inside, he meets Dr. Albert Hirsch, who ran Treadstone's psychological conditioning program. With his help, Bourne remembers that, as Captain David Webb, he volunteered for the program and killed a man in the same room. Horrified by the memory of what he did to complete his conditioning and to assume the Jason Bourne identity, he tells Hirsch, "I remember everything. I'm no longer Jason Bourne."
Breaking off from the flashback, Bourne jumps out a window when CIA agents barge into the room. After a relatively short chase to the roof Paz holds Bourne at gunpoint and demands to know why Bourne spared his life. "Do you even know why you're supposed to kill me?....Look at us. Look at what they make you give," says Bourne, repeating the dying words of the Treadstone assassin called The Professor from The Bourne Identity. Paz lowers his weapon, but Vosen appears and fires at Bourne just as he jumps from the roof into the East River below.
Some time later, Nicky sees a news report noting the exposure of Blackbriar, the arrests of Hirsch and Vosen, that Ezra Kramer is the subject of a United States Senate hearing regarding his conduct, and that David Webb was shot and fell into the East River but his body was not recovered, even after a three-day search, at which Nicky smiles knowingly. In the final moments of the film Bourne is shown swimming away in the East River.
The film co-starred Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez, Albert Finney, and Joan Allen. The key cast members reprise their roles from the two previous Bourne movies, with additions such as Strathairn playing a CIA department head, Considine as a British journalist, and Ramirez as a new assassin sent to kill Bourne. The script was by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi, and an uncredited Tom Stoppard.[3] The producers were Patrick Crowley, Frank Marshall, Paul L. Sandberg, and Doug Liman, who directed the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity.
The Bourne Ultimatum was filmed at the Pinewood Studios in London and in multiple locations around the world, including Tangier, London, Paris, Madrid (as itself and double for Turin), Berlin (as double for Moscow), New York City, and other locations in the U.S.[4]
In the audio commentary for the current DVD release of The Bourne Ultimatum, director Paul Greengrass confirmed the following scenes were deliberate allusions to scenes from the previous installments of the Bourne film franchise.[5] They include:
As with the previous films in the trilogy, the score was composed by John Powell. A new version of Moby's "Extreme Ways", entitled "Extreme Ways (Bourne's Ultimatum)", was recorded for the film's end credits.
The Bourne Ultimatum earned $69.2 million during its opening weekend at the box office, a record for a single opening in August[14] and $441.2 million worldwide as of December 14, 2007.[15] As of September 2008, the film has a 93% fresh rating (202 out of 217 positive reviews) at Rotten Tomatoes,[14] higher than either predecessor.[16][17] The film had a rating of 85/100 on Metacritic, again higher than the first two films.[18] At the end of its theatrical release, the film grossed at total of $227,471,070 in the U.S., making it the highest grossing film in the series.
Like its predecessor, The Bourne Supremacy, the film was criticized for its shaky camera work, as Richard Corliss of Time magazine, in an otherwise positive review, wondered "why, in the chat scenes, the camera is afflicted with Parkinson's? The film frame trembles, obscures the speaker with the listener's shoulder, annoys viewers and distracts them from the content of the scene."[19]
In the British press, the inclusion of a fictional journalist from the real British paper The Guardian and scenes set in the United Kingdom (particularly Waterloo railway station) were commented upon. In particular, that newspaper's reviewer noted that "dodging bullets from a CIA sniper... is the sort of thing which happens to us Guardian journalists all the time."[20][21][22][23]
The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.[24]
The film won Academy Awards in all three (second highest amount of awards at the ceremony) of its nominations at the 80th Academy Awards:
In May 2007, prior to the release of Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon claimed that he would not be interested in returning for a fourth Bourne film, stating (of his participation in the Bourne franchise): "We have ridden that horse as far as we can."[28] Damon even said in an interview on The Daily Show that director Paul Greengrass joked that a fourth film could be titled "The Bourne Redundancy."[29] Nonetheless, the financial and critical success of Bourne Ultimatum has led to speculation in several magazines and Internet forums that another Bourne film might be produced. On February 22, 2008, Variety reported that a fourth film was indeed in the works, with both Damon and Greengrass on board.[30]
However, on March 9, 2008, Damon and Greengrass claimed they had not agreed to another Bourne film.[31] Damon stated "There are a lot of things that would have to happen before we would sign up for it."[31] On June 25, 2008, producers Frank Marshall and Pat Crowley said in an interview to IESB.net there would be a fourth Bourne film. Marshall said "Hopefully they will be shooting next summer for a release in 2010 and our favorite anti-hero is apparently headed to South America."[32] On October 16th it was announced that George Nolfi would write the script, with Frank Marshall producing, and Jeffrey Weiner and Henry Morrison executive producing. Matt Damon, Julia Stiles and Paul Greengrass are also attached to the film.[33][34]
|
|
Preceded by The Simpsons Movie |
Box office number-one films of 2007 (USA) August 5, 2007 |
Succeeded by Rush Hour 3 |