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mungerc
Reviews
Ong-Bak (2003)
continuous action for those of you who can't stand a story line
When I see an action movie I don't want it to be burdened by a plot. All I want to see is people getting knocked unconscious and high speed car chases without all the mind numbing character development and complicated plot twists. This movie delivers just what I was hoping for. The exposition sets up a conflict and that's all that is needed for the oncoming barrage of impressive fights, chases, and stunts. For those of you who want plot with your action movies, go see The Matrix.
I was also not disappointed by the technical work on this movie. There were no annoying super close shaky camera shots lit by strobe lights. The main actor knew his moves and did them well so there was no need to hide him through shoddy camera work. Most of the time the camera was pulled back enough that you could see him do all his stunts with clarity. The editing was also done in a way to showcase all his stunts. The most impressive stunts were shown at least three times from different angles to make the stunts look three times more impressive I'd guess.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Awful Awful Awful
This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The camera was hand held and shot close throughout the entire movie. The resulting image was shaky and quite nauseating. Using all hand held shots works most of the time. When the shots are from one continuous viewpoint, and involve very few cuts, it can make you feel like you are part of the action. Not so in this movie.
Since the camera was always so close to the subject, you could never quite tell what was happening. A gun fired! But who was holding it? As well as the notorious floorboards shot in the car chase scenes. I don't know why the director thought throwing in a shot of Matt Damon's feet on the floorboards multiple times was a good idea, but they are there. Jason pushed the accelerator! The editing was terrible. In the action scenes, no shot was longer than 3 frames. In the calm scenes, no shot was longer than 15 frames. Why? Maybe cutting that often would have been okay if the camera hadn't been so shaky, the frame wasn't always so tight, or maybe if the director wasn't constantly violating the 180 degree rule in order to add more confusion to an already confusing mess.
The lighting was the worst I've seen in a long time. Simply because they didn't use any lights. I was praying for the nighttime scenes to end so I could see what was going on again. Of course, when I could see, I didn't want to because it made me want to puke from the camera shake.
The story was okay. Standard action fare. The story followed too many characters around for me to really care about any of them. All I really wanted was to see (or at least hear) Jason Bourne to knock everybody unconscious.
My advice is to see something else. Not some garbage that was obviously made by a high school amateur. How about James Bond?