reviews

‘Bourne’-again action revival/By Roger Moore

FILM: The Bourne Legacy

CAST: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach

DIRECTION: Tony Gilroy

You don’t need Matt Damon to revive the Bourne film franchise. And you probably don’t need Paul Greengrass, the quick-cutting action auteur who directed the best of the Damon films about Jason Bourne, the trained and chemically-altered super-spy who has lost his memory and is being hunted by the very people who made him.

But if you’re bringing back Treadstone, introducing a new spy and new government overlords searching for him, moving on from Bourne, hoping to build on his “Legacy”, you sure better grab us, straight out of the box. An epic chase for your finale, two hours later, isn’t enough.

Tony (Michael Clayton) Gilroy burns through 30 minutes of The Bourne Legacy without much happening. He takes a good, solid hour before getting this sequel-reboot on its feet. And an hour of Edward Norton, Stacy Keach and Donna Murphy and company sputtering dense spy agency jargon in a dimly-lit “sit rep” room full of computers, phones and TV monitors is more than a test of patience. It’s a test of whether this franchise deserves to go on.

Events here are concurrent with the tail end of The Bourne Ultimatum. Things have gone “sideways”, and the spy lords need to tidy up. We glimpse Bourne in still photos, and Joan Allen and Albert Finney in scenes so disembodied as to seem like left-over footage from previous films.

If we’ve heard David Strathairn mutter, “This is a national security emergency” once, we’ve heard him say it a dozen times.

Norton is in charge of ending this operation of chemically-altered soldiers, turning them into efficient, smart, hyper-sensitive killing machines. He makes a lot of speeches to get his team on task.

“We are the ‘sin eaters,’” he preaches. “We are morally indefensible and absolutely necessary.”

The one agent they’re having trouble tricking into taking one last pill — the one that’ll kill him — is Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner). Cross dodges the drone sent to take him out and uses all his skills — his super hearing, his deadly sniper training, his pilot’s licence, his self-made safe houses and safe cars — to make his way back to the lab where he was altered, to get help from the doctor (Rachel Weisz) who helped create him.

Gilroy loses himself in the globe-spanning geography of this scandal, the scientific grunt work of Big Pharma, the pills Cross must keep taking to avoid a meltdown, the blood samples Cross takes and ships to the lab. Four films into the franchise, and Gilroy wants to show us how this sort of programme might work. So much so that he keeps the characters separated, at a clinical distance.

Which is what Dr Marta Shearing (Weisz) has always done. Then, the science experiment she and her colleagues turned loose blows up on her. And it’s only then that Bourne lives up to its legacy.

Renner is a more credible action hero than Damon, who benefited from blindingly fast editing. But Cross is not a compelling character until he finds the doctor, confronts her with “That’s what I am to you, a number?” and tells her he needs his “chems”.

Their scenes together — confrontations hurled at us as they go on the run — are what bring Bourne to life. Cross challenges Dr Shearing’s “just following orders/just collecting a cheque” morality.

Gilroy saves his big action beats for the latter acts and his great chase — a rehash of the parkour-influenced rooftop romps of earlier Bournes — for the finale. He and his co-writer brother Dan revisit not just earlier Bourne characters, but earlier Bourne plot contrivances. (You have to have a super-duper-agent to chase down your rogue super agent, right?)

The Gilroys don’t kill or wreck The Bourne Legacy. But this Treadstone retread just treads water, and that’s no way to make it Bourne again.— MCT

 Charming and touching

FILM: Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings (animation)

VOICE-CAST: Anjelica Huston, Mae Whitman, Lucy Hale, Lucy Liu, Angela Bartys

DIRECION: Peggy Holmes, Bobs Gannaway

his is a gentle animated feature about fairies, suitable for ages about three to nine years old.

Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings is latest movie in the “Disney Fairies” franchise, which includes two previous feature-length films, several books, magazines and a website.

In this adventure, Tinker Bell sneaks off to the mysterious Winter Woods where the Frost Fairies live, and discovers she has a twin sister called Periwinkle. However, Tink’s wings can’t cope with the cold climate, and Periwinkle’s wings can’t cope with Pixie Hollow’s warmth, so the two sisters can’t spend any time together.

Tink’s friends make a snow machine that enables Periwinkle to visit Tinker Bell, but it also throws the seasons out of balance, which threatens the ecology of the whole fairy realm.

An environmental disaster in a Tinker Bell movie? Climate change comes to Pixie Hollow? Admittedly, it’s local freezing rather than global warming, but it seems a little extreme for the target audience — especially as the crisis is not clearly resolved; things just get better.

But until its turn towards the apocalyptic, Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings is a rather sweet movie. The CGI animation might not be up to Pixar’s standard, but it is perfectly adequate for creating a soft-hued fairy wonderland. There is the usual comic interplay between Tink and her fairy friends, lots of age-appropriate gags and slapstick, and the central story about long-lost sisters finally finding each other is both charming and touching.

(DVDs courtesy:  

Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)

Terror trap

 FILM: ATM

CAST: Alice Eve, Josh Peck, Brian Geraghty, Steve Nagribianko, Aaron Hughes

DIRECTION: David Brooks

This film shows that there are scarier things than a low bank balance.

In what is essentially a four-person play, three young executives — played by Alice Eve, Josh Peck and Brian Geraghty — find themselves trapped at an isolated ATM on a sub-zero night. They can’t leave because there’s an ominous figure lurking outside the door.

Director David Brooks does his best to build and sustain the terror but the chills fade near the halfway point. He does get a lot of mileage out of Peck’s character, who is so obnoxious that you wish the other two would toss him out into the cold.

The film is saved in the end by a clever bit of writing by Chris Sparling that offers a couple of interesting twists on the story.

ATM offers up a unique setting and then plays cat and mouse with its characters as the film progresses. It’s a movie that has little on its mind except stringing the audience along until the final, somewhat inevitable conclusion. The story and characters aren’t new. The person stalking them is of the masked variety, this time wearing a large fuzzy winter parka and dozens of thermal underwear.

ATM is a mix of the obvious and the surprising. There are moments when it’s clear where the story is going (which character is going to be killed first) while other times one isn’t sure what the killer is going to do. While revelling in heavy cliché, it’s well made and understands the pacing needed for a good thriller.

Because we never get to know the characters, our investment in them ends up being minimal. While the stakes are high, our emotional connections aren’t. The final moments of the film don’t allow any of the survivors much empathy.

But it is a bit difficult to swallow that one person would go to this kind of trouble to terrorise three random strangers without any motive or rationale.— WS

(DVD courtesy:

Kings Electronics, Doha)