I have very little bad to say about this film, but not that
much especially positive either. To be fair, the latter in particular could be
because I saw it too late at night, but who knows!
In essence, I liked Jeremy Renner, I liked Rachel Weisz, and
was very happy to see Zeljko Ivanek (whom I remember always as Ray Fisk in Damages) in the movie. I also liked how
they had Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) back in the film (in a scarily convincing
turn of events), and Oscar Isaac (of whom it was all too easy to believe his
only sin was to have fallen in love!)…
What I did not
enjoy, though, was the really rather boring and repetitive central heterosexual
‘romance’ around our Bourne-esque protagonist and his partner-in-escape; nor
the glaringly conspicuous ‘united colours of…’ aspect of the movie’s having
various ‘diverse’ ethnicities represented across the range of
Treadstone/Outcome agents (and even a woman, shock horror): really, WTF is the
point, anyway, when the film is in fact focused quite intently on a young white
male with a number of similarities to Matt Damon? None of these ‘faults’ can be
laid at the door of the actors – Renner included, who was excellent. However,
the lack of thought and range of diversity of relationships (as much as
‘colour’) did detract from the whole thing, for me.
And don’t get me started on the Asian Terminator-like character…
The fight scenes were a bit crappy, too (not helped by the iddiot jock sat right in front of me who guffawed in that moron-like way only they can EVERY frickin' time someone got hit. Gah.): they were over-edited and as a result there were too many flailing limbs and insufficient evidence of actual fighting. Hardly a major cmplaint, but when the action is about the most exciting thing a film has to offer, it really should be better than it was in this one!
The echoes of Renner’s role in The Hurt Locker were also slightly problematic, and set up a slight
dissonance, I think, which was a shame.
All that said, for what it was (and it was nothing special),
the film was interesting and had plenty fun parts, and some great acting. It
also acknowledged that the early parts in which wolves are apparently tracking
human prey is not the norm (the
suggestion being that perhaps the Bourne clones aren’t ‘human’), which I
appreciated – having been pretty pissed off when the early scenes implied
that’s what wolves do. (In fact it gave me flashbacks to sitting through The Edge (1997, d. Lee Tamahori), in which a bear chased Anthony
Hopkins and a Baldwin brother relentlessly, and made me wish it would just eat
them already, to get over the ridiculousness of it all.)
Really, I just wish it
had mixed things up a bit: much as I love Weisz, I just would’ve been that much
more interested in a film that had her in the crazy doctor role, and Ivanek on the run with Renner. Now that would’ve been doing something new
and interesting!
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