What crap.

Seriously.

Ameel loved it. Stephanie Zacharek, who writes brilliant reviews for Salon, loved it. I'm sure other people did and do as well.

And there were good things about it. I liked the way the story began right where the previous movie left off, that the end looped back to the beginning, that the bad guys seemed likely to see some kind of justice. I also like the way the story looks at identity as a construct of our memories and the dissociation that happens when one loses or at least can't locate those memories. All good stuff, all interesting. I have no issues with the story itself or the larger metaphorical tale-of-our-times stuff that everyone's raving about.

No. The issues I had with the movie had more to do with the way it was put together. Did we really need all those over-the-shoulder shots of intensely intense eyes being all intense? Did we really? And all from the same angle too? Oh and how about that shaking camera? Nothing like feeling carsick in the middle of a movie theatre to put the finishing touch on your cinematic experience. And that chase in Tangier that some people loved? Oy. Yes you can run over rooftops and through windows, open or not, but do you have to do it for ten whole minutes? And yes you can beat the living shit out of the guy out to kill you, but could you, um, well just get it over with already? First you slam the guy into a wall, then you get slammed into a bookcase, then it's other random bits of furniture, then a huge mirror, then you get books involved, then you take it to the bathroom whose fixtures, naturally, come into play, and then, finally, finally, the baddie croaks. Phew. Well that was close. Because, with about half the movie's running time left, there was a big question mark there about whether the title character would make it. Yeesh.

Oh and please, let us not forget the silences. The long, meaningful, significant and deeply, deeply, deeply annoying silences. Yes, yes, he's alone and isolated. Yes the dead girlfriend is still 'there' (and far more substantial than poor ol' Julia Stiles without even being in the frame). Yes there's a story there with Stiles's character, but please somebody bloody say something. I'm all for tension building and such, but this was frustrating because the actors were so busy emoting their little guts out that they forgot to engage with anything. What is this, acting by numbers? Ameel pointed out that it might have just been bad editing, and I'd like to believe that if only because I like Stiles and I think that even in a crappy role she brings something interesting to the screen. If I can blame someone else for her crappiness, I'd like to.

One of the best scenes of the movie was utterly ruined because they show it, or at least all the important bits of it, in the trailer. God I hate it when they do that. And the less said about that inane car chase the better.

This movie annoyed me because, with all the potential there was for a truly fantastic ending to an interesting story, we got this shoot-em-up drivel rife with oh-look-I'm-pretending-to-be-a-spy speak. By the time it ended, I had no idea how it had begun, who had done what to whom, why, when, where and, quite honestly, I didn't care. Bourne gets his memory back and lives to swim out of the East River, bad men get arrested, Julia smiles to herself in a coffee shop, and all's right with the world. Lovely.

<Insert rude noise of choice>