I have been making the case for Doug Liman for years now. I’d even recently given up the claim that I completely despise Swingers (it’s mostly the neo-swing soundtrack I hate). I constantly argued that his The Bourne Identity was better than Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy — in the end Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum turned out ultimately the best — and still continue promoting the genius of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (I watched it with a newbie just the other night, and that person was convinced). But now, I am on the fence about Jumper, which I haven’t yet seen and which arrived in theaters today. I can’t decide whether to bother seeing it.
The movie certainly looks stupid. I’ll admit it. Yet this is where my Liman defending came about in the past year, especially recently, as its release got closer. Every time the trailer or TV ad came on the screen, someone would turn to me and say it looks really stupid. Or I would overhear a similar statement coming from the mouths of strangers. Oh, it has to be better than it looks, I would say. It’s Doug Liman, a great action director who tackles seemingly stupid movies. But now the reviews are out. It has an 18% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t find one trustworthy critic who offers good enough reason to see it.
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I know I’m late, but I just finally saw the last of the Bourne movies this week, and I just had to comment on the casting of Albert Finney in The Bourne Ultimatum. Was it intentional to employ an actor that would be so confusing to viewers who would easily mistake him for Brian Cox, an actor who appeared in the first two films? It’s worth noting that our first look at Finney’s character is in a photograph, and so the ability to recognize him as a different actor than we’d previously seen in the series is less than if we were introduced to him in person.
As little as I figure out what purpose it serves, I think the lookalike casting had to have been a conscious decision. After all, who hasn’t mistaken the actors for one another at some point in time? When Cox first became a heavily used character actor, I mistook him for Finney. And according to a five-year-old Page Six write-up, Cox gets wrongly identified as Finney all the time (”But I’m much better looking,” he says). It wasn’t surprising that I have found countless reviews of The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as forum comments, that acknowledge the confusion regarding Finney’s appearance in the sequel. Unfortunately, I can’t find any discussion of the film that attempts to give a reason for the casting choice.
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