"The Super Silly Sojourns
       of Supercilious Soldiers"


The Bourne Supremacy
Screenplay by Tony Gilroy based on the book by Robert Ludlum
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Starring Matt Damon and Joan Allen

The Manchurian Candidate
Screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris based on the screenplay by George Axelrod and the novel by Richard Condon
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Starring Denzel  Washington and Liev Schreiber


                I like when Jason Bourne hits people. His movements are sudden and quick and while I couldn’t imagine Matt Damon having such skill before his appearance in The Bourne Identity, the believability comes with movie magic. In the sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, the amnesiac super soldier doesn’t hit anyone for the first half hour. Once he does, I’m sitting up excited and ready for more, but the scene is only one of two such instances for marveling at the character’s instinctual programming. There is also a sequence where Bourne evades police by thinking so methodically ahead of his actions that he seems more choreographed than reactionary but it does less to depict supremacy than quick thinking and good luck.
         All other action scenes – and there really aren’t many – are so choppy and shaky that the film makes Man on Fire look calm in comparison. And while comparing Supremacy to another tale of vengeance, let me add that I am as bored with this plot incentive as I am with its ability to defend antiquated ideals. Between retribution and paranoid attribution, our movie selection is becoming as insipid as our political choices.
         While it was Doug Liman’s fluency that made Identity a success, the producers believed it was the screenplay and car chase that impressed audiences. Maybe there’s some truth in that but by here mistaking a wordy, complicated yet incoherent script and a routine demolition derby for elevated – or even lateral – entertainment, they reveal a disappointing lack of proficiency to develop movies. Another case in point is the casting of Joan Allen. Usually I find her outstanding, but her character is so obtuse that no great actress could make her a credible director of CIA operations. When Brian Cox tells her that she makes decisions as if she read them in a book, he speaks for the audience but there is no good explanation for how such a person could reach her level of authority. A friend of mine shrugs the character off saying that its representative of our current intelligence problems but seeing that The Bourne Supremacy is a movie where I expect things to make sense within their own narrative, I don’t buy that reasoning one bit.
          It is hard to ignore some picky flaws in movies that should be smarter.
         The Manchurian Candidate, another current release with so much flash-frame-flashback that between itself and Supremacy a whole feature couldn’t be compiled with the footage deleted, featured children in school on Election Day. I now understand that my state is one of the few that doesn’t have kids attend the first Tuesday of November, but while the film ran, the ignorance affected my viewing. Jonathan Demme’s political thriller is not very good, though, regardless of mistaken gaffs.
          With much less corrosion of classic cinema than his last remake, The Truth About Charlie, which managed to not only unwittingly shit on Charade but also French new-wave and the loving memory of a younger Anna Karina, Demme attempts in Candidate to astonish audiences by their confusion of intensity and complexity. The original by John Frankenheimer, imperfect nonetheless, takes things slow and easy, communicating the paranoid thrills effectively even before the coincidentally similar assassinations which followed its release. Now updated for quicker attentions and slower minds, screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris thicken the plot with a lot of wordy generalizations regarding Gulf War Syndrome, mind control and corporate puppeteering. There is also some reference and homage to African American art and justice that works about as significantly as the new-wave stuff mentioned above. Even the art direction and design in the movie are cluttered. The fictional news media’s screen layouts are busily representative of the picture as a whole.
         The characters in the remake are never believable as real people and their actions have little dramatic fulfillment. Laurence Harvey may be a whiny mess in Frankenheimer’s version but at least George Axelrod’s script gives motivation for all his character’s sayings and doings. Now characters give powerful soliloquies instead of convincing conversation because writers wish so much to be quotable (even critics hope to write something to fit well on Rotten Tomatoes). The relationships between the Shaws and the Jordans may well have been eliminated as their assassinations now become meaningless. Even the new ending lacks emotional impact while additionally missing sense and climax. Along with The Village, I, Robot and The Day After Tomorrow, Hollywood presents its political allegory so obvious, even in seemingly subtle subtexts, that few will mind the absence of conclusive cogitation. Maybe if they were as much fun as The Wizard of Oz, but in Candidate there is no creative wit in the mind control angle after forty years of mainstream conspiracy theories. In the place of a surreal tea party, Demme uses projected video game graphics. As alternative to the hypnotic solitaire and metaphoric playing cards the script uses a simple phone call. Was fear of a lawsuit keeping producers from a wink towards Salinger?
        The opening of The Manchurian Candidate takes place in 1991 and I was hoping for a reference to The Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps Jonathan Demme doesn’t want to remind audiences that he was once better than convoluted remakes, the newest of which will be forgotten in a year as Lambs still resonates. That audiences are already aware of corporate holds on politicians and probably still less worried about it than the threat of communism will be a major flaw in the remake’s importance. Maybe if someone could redo the film using assassinations of character using media defamation rather than bullets, there’d be more to relate to.