There’s a moment in The Bourne Ultimatum that sees our much put-upon hero enjoy a rare moment of quiet respite in a roadside cafè with Julia Stiles’ CIA agent. Bourne asks why she’s helping him and she replies ‘It was difficult… for me… with you. You… really don’t remember anything, do you?’.

For a moment the air is pregnant with possibility, intimations of a former intimacy but suddenly the chase is back on and the thought disappears without ever fully forming. A lesser film in lesser hands would have laid everything bare for the viewer, spelling things out and diminishing the poignancy; Bourne may have been a cold-blooded killer in his previous life, a CIA murder-machine, but he was still some mother’s son, some woman’s lover who lost more than just his memory when he fell wounded from that boat, way back in Identity. In Greengrass’s hands (and, formerly, Doug Liman’s) Bourne isn’t a wise-cracking womaniser who dispatches enemies with a well-timed quip; he’s an enigmatic figure of tragedy, who speaks little and kills less and less indiscriminately as the series goes on.

Though it has it’s moments of indulgence, Ultimatum’s excesses seem restrained when compared to that other big actioner of the summer season - Die Hard 4.0. That film had a plot so contrived that there were almost as many scenes consisting solely of (ultimately nonsensical) exposition* as there were sequences in which John McClane received a beating that would kill even the toughest of real life NYPD detectives. The narrative in Ultimatum is kept deliberately lean and essentially consists of one long, nation-hopping chase. But that’s not to say that the plot isn’t clever because it is and the way in which the film’s entire duration is folded into the space between Supremacy’s final scene and its epilogue is just one of many stand-out, holy-shit moments.

The rest of those moments are largely accounted for by the action scenes, of which there are many. The ’shaky-cam’ effect is back (it’s Greengrass’s signature technique) which is a good thing in my opinion but may be less agreeable if you are prone to motion sickness or have crappy cinema seats. For my money, it lends an urgency to proceedings and makes the fight scenes seem more urgent. One hand to hand rumble had me feeling giddy one moment, as Bourne fended off an attacker with a hardback book, and then immediately uncomfortable as he finally managed to overcome and strangle his opponent with a towel. I’m not convinced that this scene would have evoked the same emotion had it been filmed with static cameras and wider angles.

And really, it’s an abundance of these little details that elevates the Bourne trilogy above films like Shooter and the aforementioned Die Hard 4.0.

* There’s a school of thought that Hollywood basically treats computers as a form of magic. Depictions of computers and technology in mainstream Hollywood movies (and TV shows) tend to be at odds with reality and computers are frequently used as de facto Deus Ex Machina plot contrivances, even in films and shows that shouldn’t ostensibly need them - I’m looking at you, CSIs Las Vegas, Miami and Mulhuddart.

To Die Hard 4.0’s credit, it does acknowledge this Hollywoodised view of technology by having a ‘master hacker’ whose online handle is ‘Warlock’.

We went to see Tristan + Isolde the other night. OK, first a disclaimer: I love watching films and as such I have no problem admitting to enjoying films that would be regarded by most (including me, sometimes) as crappy. As such, I was entertained by Tristan + Isolde for the hour and a half or so that I was in the cinema. But at the same time, my love of films doesn’t blind me to the deficiencies of the films that I watch and there were plenty of those in T+I.

First, the bizarre plot embellishment that had the Irish ruling the English with a fist of steel and a healthy dose of divide and conquer. I mean, what the fuck was that all about?

Secondly, Isolde reading John Donne. Again, what the fuck? Ignoring the fact that Isolde probably wouldn’t have been able to read and that the printing press hadn’t been invented and that books - which were produced by hand - were pretty much limited to fancy reproductions of the Bible, Donne lived hundreds of years after the period in which this film was set!

Besides those two points, the film was a little lacklustre. It’s directed by Kevin Reynolds, who was behind The Count of Monte Cristo and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But whereas both of those films are fun*, this film just plain isn’t. It’s lovely to look at, the battle scenes are well-choreographed and the acting - particularly Rufus Sewell and Bronagh Gallagher - is quite good. James Franco, as Tristan, was a bit dull and spent most of the film being mopey and surly. Sophia Myles, as Isolde, was great. That annoying kid out of Love Actually was in it at the start. My hopes were dashed, however, when I discovered that he was playing Tristan as a child and there was therefore no chance of him getting whacked.

* Yeah, I think Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is fun. Yeah, it’s stupid and yeah, Kevin Costner sucks but the film is still fun. Alan Rickman alone is worth the price of admission.

Holy shit! I can’t believe it’s over two months since my last update! And I was so dilligent up to now!

Anyway, the wife and I had a bit of a lazy Sunday yesterday; she watched pretty much all of series two of One Tree Hill, while I played through a huge swathe of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and then watched the kinda-film of the game.

The film is… interesting. Overall, I would say it’s enjoyable but it’s an odd piece of cinema, even considered in its own right. Considered alongside Pitch Black it becomes even odder and not necessarily in a good way (though not in an entirely bad way either).

Pitch Black was a low budget sci-fi horror flick about a motley group of space travellers whose ship crash lands on a desert planet inhabited by deadly winged bat-like creatures who are intolerant of light and hence only come out at night. Fortunately, because the planet orbits three suns night only happens once very 22 years. Unfortunately it’s 22 years since the last one (surprise, surprise!). What raises the film above being an inferior me-too Alien copycat is the tension created by the Riddick character. Riddick is a serial killer who is being transported to a new prison on board the doomed ship. Because of his ‘eye shine’ which lends his eyes a brilliant blue colour and enables him to see in a total absence of light, Riddick quickly becomes the survivors’ only hope of fending off the aliens and escaping the planet.

There is no moral ambiguity about Riddick in this film: he is the worst kind of criminal - remorseless and hungry to offend again - so for much of the of the film we are left wondering who is more dangerous to the other characters: the aliens or their apparent saviour.

There’s no such dilemma in Chronicles of Riddick. For the sequel, director David Twohy ramps things up hugely, moving the plot from a quasi-realistic, gritty future to one that could have come straight from the pages of Nemesis the Warlock, the 2000 A.D strip about a future war between the evil Terrans (who are intent on killing all ‘deviants’) and er… everyone else. A race called the Necromongers are sweeping the galaxy, converting everyone in their path to their religion and killing those that refuse to bow. If their name and modus operandi (and goth/baroque costumary) wasn’t enough of a hint, a voiceover at the film’s outset helpfully informs us that the Necromongers are pure evil and that sometimes the only way to fight evil is with another kind of evil.

Which is obviously a reference to Riddick and sho’ nuff, within 30 minutes he has been lured out of hiding and set to fighting the Necromongers. Which is all well and good except this particular Riddick doesn’t feel particularly evil. Part of the problem is that for the most part none of the people that he dispatches are particularly likeable and for the most part are pretty nasty themselves. At worst Riddick feels like the T-100 in the original Terminator movie: it’s the way he’s wired. This feeling is made more apparent when it is revealed that Riddick is actually the sole surviving member of a race called the Furions (except (frustratingly because it’s an unnecessary plot point) there is another). Not the Peacions or the Irritatedions mind, the Furions. This revelation just serves to further undermine the mystique that had developed around the character in Pitch Black.

So that’s one of the ways in which …Riddick is odd. If you read reviews of the film when it was originally released, or look at the User Comments section of IMDB you’ll find a lot of people bemoaning the fact that …Riddick doesn’t really feel like a sequel to Pitch Black. I don’t because in a way that’s only half true.

Much of the middle act of the film feels similar to the original: the quasi-realism is back - there are no Necromongers, no Elementals and no ages-old prohecies. Instead there’s a mining prison and the re-introduction of a character from Pitch Black: ‘Jack’, the girl who idolised Riddick. In the original film, Jack attempted to imitate Riddick; in this film - feeling betrayed because he abandoned her to go on the run - she has stopped trying to emulate her former idol, reverted back to her real name (Kyra) and now finds herself incarcerated on Chrematos (0r something), presumably a result of her earlier attempts to out-Riddick Riddick. On learning of her imprisonment, Riddick allows himself to be captured by a bounty hunter so that he can help her escape.

As I said, this part of the film feels closer in tone (if not necessarily in theme) to Pitch Black and even flips some of that film’s biggest plot points on their head: the humans now live in underground caves and, when topside, have to avoid the blistering daylight. It really is like Pitch Black: Five Years Later and is completely at odds with the first and third acts. In that sense, Chronicles of Riddick feels like two films and that is the other odd thing about it.

Like I said earlier though, I quite like it - I love pulp sci-fi junk and it doesn’t get any pulpier than this. But I can’t help feel that there are two great films in Chronicles of Riddick: one is a true sequel to Pitch Black, the other is an epic battle of good versus evil.