Big disappointment

My friend Suzanne liked it and my friend Frank said "Wow!" but I have to admit that I wasn't too thrilled with The Bourne Ultimatum. The plot was such a retread - haven't we seen that same story in a dozen movies made in the 1980s? You saw the ending coming long before it arrived. To be fair, I'd heard the movie was all action, but didn't find it so - lots of scenes of talk, many quite good. Matt Damon is excellent and so is Joan Allen, but even Larry thought David Strathairn was utterly wasted. Of course, I enjoyed the political message, but it was pretty heavy handed. But my biggest objection - it got SO improbable - how many car crashes can a guy walk away from - even the assassin, apparently near death, appears in the next scene without a scratch. Too distracting. And speaking of distracting, as one imdb commenter said, "get a tripod!" - can it count as a verite camera style if you can't even see what's going on in the scene? I esp hated the way they repeatedly obstructed the face of the person facing the camera when two people were speaking onscreen. It was interesting once, but, again, distracting when done over and over. And I have to admit I felt a bit gypped by the scene of Bourne and Nicki in the hotel room - couldn't they throw a bone to the girlfriends in the audience who were dragged there - they were sharing a moment, would it have killed them to take it a little further? Oh well. Not a waste of two hours, but definitely not what I had hoped.

SPOILER ALERT

And I didn't understand why Bourne has these harrowing memories of being brutalized by Albert Finney's character AND Pam Landy reads in his file that he resisted entry into the program, BUT in his conversation with AF at the end, he is told that he volunteered and we see him shooting the prisoner. Those seemed like two contradictory versions of events and yet nothing was done to explain what "really" happened. My theory is that AF was lying to him at the end, but if so, why did he (Bourne) claim to remember it the way AF said it happened? It was just confusing. After contemplating it further, I still don't know what to think.