Best Films of 2007 #5: The Bourne Ultimatum

Difficult to contemplate how good Paul Greengrass's spy movie is until you compare it to another heavily politicized action movie released this year, Peter Berg's The Kingdom. A movie that exploits children for cheap identification with characters killed in the opening terrorist sequence, this is the kind of rancorous stuff that has so many people annoyed with the way Hollywood attempts to comment on current affairs. The film asks us to be annoyed on behalf of our American heroes for an hour and a half as their illegal micro-invasion of Saudi Arabia is justifiably caught up in red tape, then promptly begs us to cheer along as they kill every Arab in sight with the slight evidence they were able to uncover from what Jamie Foxx brazenly and incorrectly identifies as the worst crime in the country's history (why, because so many Americans were killed in this instance?!). Then it expects us to think it's subversive since it pays two minutes of lip service at the end to the parallel desire to kill the "bad" guys held by Americans and Saudis. Problem is, we've been led for two hours to believe that we're simply right for wanting to kill those bad guys! I don't object on principle (like some critics do) to turning our current world climate into an action movie: I object to turning it into this action movie.

The Bourne Ultimatum, on the other hand, has a message that makes sense, and, more to the point, it hits the pulse of the current world climate in a way that I appreciate, personally. Yes, it's partisan politics thrown into the realm of cinema, but who are we fooling here by trying to suggest that they aren't the same anyway? Greengrass gives us some of the very best action scenes of the year, and it uses them to create an allegory about how we need to remember how to be good as a nation after a voluntary fall and an amnesiac plunge into a world in which the rules no longer make sense. In other words, it exploits our affect as any action film does, but it does so for the purpose of questioning how our desire for "action" translates into international suffering. This renunciation of the action film was the trend in general for the best action movies of the year (see also Live Free or Die Hard, Shoot 'em Up, Exiled, 3:10 to Yuma, and even, in its glorious parody of the action heroes who don't actually kill anyone, Hot Fuzz).