The Bourne Triology (English)

These are testing times, I am torn between my loyalties; my love for football impeding my craving for films and in between my jealous mistress trying to catch up with renewed vigor, the days lost during summer vacation!

Life is difficult but still I could manage to see the Bourne Trilogy back to back. The screenplay is based on the novels written by Robert Ludlum, who I ignored for no reason during my college days when I was chasing James Hadley Chase, Irving Wallace, Sidney Sheldon etc., Ludlum I am told, known for his thrillers on international conspiracies and of course these three films are about a renegade CIA spy, who couldn’t remember his past and the events that unfold one by one brings in the memories bit by bit and the agency which created him into a killing machine by wiping his past is now trying to eliminate him.

Matt Damon, with very ordinary looks and physique hardly be a choice to don the role of an action hero, particularly when he has to emerge unscathed out of every action scene however much difficult the situation be, with the ease of a superman; But he dispelled my doubts with a convincing effort, may be due to the deft editing with jump-cuts and shaky camera. Our film-makers use a crude version of this technique to make our heroines do Bharathanatyam!

It was only when I was watching through the third film, I understood that that it was the editing with shaky camera ably complemented by background music, I was ‘illusion’ed to believe as if the trilogy was a fast paced edge of the seat thriller. As hero jumps from one city to another all around the globe including our own Goa as if he was in a constant hurry to catch a train, even when there isn’t anything worry about, little we realize that it a spell cast by the director; that is the uniqueness in which these films stand apart.

I must admit that at the end of this ‘filmathon’ exercise, I thought of our own Billa, which Suresh Krishna successfully passed off here as a thriller with Ajith walking in slow-motion even while drawing his guns and pumping bullets!

(From Facebook 18/06/14)