Sunday, August 05, 2007

JASON BOURNE vs HOMER SIMPSON... who shall survive?

Warning: There are so many fucking spoilers in this blog entry that if you're the sort of person who gets all pissy and whiney about people putting spoilers into their blog entries, you should just take a pair of chopsticks and gouge your eyes out with them and then pop your eardrums with them and then tear out your tongue with them before you read this blog entry. Thank you.

So, okay, on Friday SuperWife and I saw two movies -- THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM and THE SIMPSONS MOVIE.

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM is just about the stupidest goddam spy thriller I have ever seen, but who cares? Yes, there are two separate sequences in the film where all a particular supporting character would have had to do to foil the evil enemy assassins is put on a frickin' hat, but never mind that. And, yes, the lead character, who has spent three films now being chased all over the universe by every CIA spy in existence, continues to refuse to even consider doing anything that would in any way alter his distinctively Matt Daimonesque features. And yes, yes, yes, there's the brain paralyzingly moronic sequence 2/3s of the way through the film where Jason Bourne manages to discover where the Enemy CIA Agent Who Is In Charge Of All Of America's Black Ops hides the Super Secret Bourne File by watching the stupid motherfucker through a telescope from across the street because the stupid motherfucker is too stupid to close his office window shades while he's walking around with a TOP SECRET file clearly marked CIA SPECIAL OPERATIONS TOP SECRET EYES ONLY in his hand.

It doesn't matter. On Earth-Jason Bourne, being a super-spy doesn't require intelligence or cunning. All real intelligence work is done by specially brainwashed operatives intensively trained in Super Ninja Kung Fu Shit, and they don't need to know anything about disguise or being sneaky or drawing their window shades or any of that fruity crap. In the Jason Bourne universe, super spies simply kill everything that walks, runs, limps, crawls, or even just sits there blinking in terrified awe within thirty yards of them. If the CIA is mad at you, they send out the equivalent of the Hulk in natty pants to fucking DESTROY you. And this works great, too, until and unless they are stupid enough to unleash one of their immaculately barbered neo-Hulks on the greatest and most immaculately barbered neo-Hulk of them all, Jason Bourne.

In the Jason Bourne Universe, Chuck Norris is a whining puling pussy-girl who isn't worthy to polish Jason Bourne's extensive collection of slaughtered enemy skulls. In the Jason Bourne Universe, if you encounter Bourne and he isn't trying to kill you, you had better do exactly what he says the instant he says it, because if you don't (and you're too stupid to put on a hat) YOU WILL DIE!!!!! In the Jason Bourne Universe, if you are foolish enough to do anything to enrage Jason Bourne, YOU WILL ALSO DIE!!!!! Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day, soon, and then every day, for the rest of your life. Piss off Jason Bourne, and Jason Bourne will beat you half to death with the soles of his feet, thrash you nearly senseless with his precisely plucked eyebrows, whack you in the jugular over and over and over AGAIN with your own goddam leather-bound first edition copy of THE PROPHET by Kahlil Gibrain, and then kill you by thumb rubbing your larynx at exactly the precise vibrational frequency to cause your eyeballs to be sucked into your esophogus by reverse peristalsis, where they will EXPLODE WITH A FORCE EQUIVALENT TO A THOUSAND HIROSHIMAS!!!!

And he'll do it all while Julia Styles stands three feet away getting totally hot for him, too. Which he won't notice, or care about, because the hot Franke Potente chick from the first movie is still dead, goddamit, and he will mourn for her forever, even as he's inserting his foot to the ankle in some covert NSA assassin's hightly trained rectum at 345 miles per hour.

Once you understand the basic premises of any spy thriller action movie taking place in the Jason Bourne universe, everything makes perfect sense... well, except for this one sequence, where Jason Bourne breaks into the Evil CIA Guy's office and uses tape on a gun pommel to get the guy's thumb print and a tape recorder to reproduce the guy's voice and manages to unlock the guy's very sophisticated safe so he can steal all the TOP SECRET files. This seems pretty foolish to me because Jason Bourne should have just roundhouse kicked that extremely advanced safe into titanium splinters and then plucked its former contents from within its shattered ruined remnants, as easily as you or I or even Molly Ringwald would snatch a bunch of grapes off a produce display at a supermarket. But what the fuck. Maybe he was tired, or something.

For all the sheer mindless stupidity of THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (and I should note in passing that nobody in this movie ever issues anything remotely like an ultimatum to anyone else at any time), it's enormously fun and entertaining to watch Matt Daimon running all over the Earth constantly killing everything within a fifteen foot radius of him.

Now, THE SIMPSONS MOVIE was also incredibly stupid, but, well, THE SIMPSONS are supposed to be stupid, it's pretty much their purpose for existing, and I found this film to be even more hilarious than THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and, you know, since THE SIMPSONS MOVIE was actually supposed to be a comedy, I was satisfied that this was so.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:59 PM

    hilarious. came over from Henley's joint.

    you've got a new fan, fanboy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ran,

    Thanks for the kind words. Has Henley linked to me? I did not know.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4:26 AM

    Well said.

    ReplyDelete

truth