An amusingly written look at the Bourne Ultimatum by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.
The Guardian has had an unhappy time in the movies recently. When it is represented on screen, it is generally in a way that is frankly disobliging. Heather Graham played a Guardian journalist and G2 feature writer in the mind-bendingly awful thriller Killing Me Softly, in which she was called upon to wear a bizarre pair of over-large specs, like some sort of deranged Christopher Biggins, to indicate professional worthiness and naivety. Then there was Dennis Quaid playing a Dubya-type US president in the reality TV satire American Dreamz. He was seen with a copy of the Guardian open in front of him in the Oval Office, marvelling at its contents: "There's so much good stuff in here!" His enthusiasm was of course indicative of going soft and pinko and wobbly.
How gratifying to see this paper finally being shown in an exciting and glamorous light - in this third movie in the Bourne franchise, a display of car-crashing, head-banging action mayhem, directed with frenetic verve by Britain's Paul Greengrass, famed for the 9/11 classic United 93. There is no "ultimatum" in the story, incidentally. It's just there in the title to differentiate this film from the others, an alternative to sequel numbering. It might as well be called The Bourne Conundrum or The Bourne Spirograph or The Bourne Cornflake.
Our hero is the ferocious but amnesiac CIA tough guy Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon, the contours of whose rock-hard pecs are traced by his drum-tight T-shirt. It's the role that turned this moon-faced boy into a man.
He's tracking down the faceless executives on his own side who want him dead, before he recovers his memory and gains access to dangerous truths about their wrongdoing. The riddle of his identity is solved at the end, but not before Bourne has teamed up with a tough investigative reporter from the Guardian with the superbly self-deprecating name of Simon Ross, who is on the trail of the same CIA conspiracy; he is played by Paddy Considine.
Obviously, I would have preferred to see this Guardian journalist do a little more ass-kicking, or indeed any ass-kicking: an omission also sharply noted by Mr Considine himself in an interview with this paper last week. Nevertheless, he gets to show a fair bit of courage under fire. He and Bourne are shadowed by a creepy CIA surveillance spook who has already given a chilling order to "prepare rendition protocols". Huh! Bring it on! Guardian journalists aren't scared of Guantánamo.
They wind up in London's crowded Waterloo station where they have to dodge bullets from a CIA sniper, that of course is the sort of thing which happens to us all the time. But there are inaccuracies. The Guardian stylebook clearly states that if you are under a hail of bullets in a public place from an assassin run by a deniable intelligence unit, you have to duck into the nearest internet cafe and start blogging about it to keep the readers informed.
So having been long portrayed as the soggy, wussy liberal, the Guardian journalist gets to be an action man. Or at least hang out with an action man who reads the Guardian. The only thing I was a bit concerned about was this Guardian journalist's man bag. It flapped across his lower back in a worryingly metrosexual way. You don't see Jason Bourne with a man bag.
As an aside, I don't believe the Guardian has a reporter with the job title of security correspondent (please correct me if I'm wrong). The paper does have security editor Richard Norton-Taylor, but I suspect his best action-movie-character days are behind him. :)
Here's my Bourne Ultimatum review. I gave it seven out of 10. Bradshaw gave it four stars out of five. I suspect he gave it a slight bounce as a sop to the home team.
It should be noted that the Financial Times' Martin Hoyle took a slightly snarkier view of the Guardian reporter's character in BU than did Bradshaw:
The third instalment in the amnesiac's saga whisks us through Moscow, Russia, Turin, Italy, Tangier, Morocco, and New York, unspecified. Early on it plunges breathlessly into a cracking action sequence in rush-hour Waterloo (London, England, not Belgium) as CIA operatives try to foil a meeting between our hero and Fleet Street's finest. This is The Guardian's security correspondent, who, given that he fails to notice a passer-by dumping an alien mobile phone in his pocket and panics at the sight of a litter-collector, may have made an unwise career choice. Or so our hero suspects, to judge by his snarl of "This isn't a story in a noospaper - this is real", a nice distinction. It doesn't prevent the Guardian man being shot, a victim of London public transport's notorious overcrowding. ...
A rattling yarn exuberantly told, crunchingly violent but not too sadistic, give or take the odd Guardian journalist.
Gee, the Independent's Anthony Quinn didn't stoop to making fun of the Guardian guy in his review. In fact, didn't even mention him. :)
Nor did James Christopher in the Times of London.
The Telegraph's Sukdhev Sandhu did note the journalist character in his review, but would only say that person worked for a "London broadsheet." Can't bring himself to write Guardian, eh? :)