The template for the Bourne series’ action is set 11 minutes into The Bourne Identity, when a pair of Zürich policemen approach amnesiac agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). But more importantly, the aesthetic is perfectly in tune with the series’ themes and its character-centric drama - which isn’t often true when other movies copy the style. From a technical standpoint, each Bourne sequence is more precise than the imitation versions, down to the vital difference of a handful of frames. But its deployment in the Bourne series stands apart from the way its successors use it. Moviegoers might argue that it poisoned the American action well, making too many movie fights incomprehensible and even nauseating. The dizzying, choppy Bourne fight style has its pros and cons. The Taken films even applied it to Liam Neeson jumping a fence. Still, the impressionistic fight aesthetic spawned so many imitators that it became Hollywood’s lingua franca across the action spectrum, employed by everything from the macho ’80s throwback Expendables series to Disney superhero fare like Captain America: Civil War. The Bourne franchise is known for quick-cut, shaky-cam action, but there’s less than six minutes of hand-to-hand combat across Doug Liman’s 2002 series-launcher The Bourne Identity, and Paul Greengrass’ sequels, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum.
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