By giving your protagonist amnesia, you equip him with an arbitrarily extensible backstory. Here we get some sort of genesis and conclusion, replete with the good Americans cleaning up the bad Russians. Yeah right, says Pussy Riot, in Putin's Russia you're going to get the cops arresting cronies. The camera work is the epitome of the shaky style of that era (circa 2004) that makes a lot of it unwatchable without a handful of amphetamines. The dialogue is generally atrocious and Julia Stiles gets loaded with the worst of it. Joan Allen makes success look like a booby prize. Matt Damon is the best part of all of this. I got bored being shown what was amply implied.
And that about wraps it up for Jason Damon. This is another genesis effort, where (cough) Stryker accepts a willing volunteer into his augmentation program, creating a beast that bites the hand that feeds. (I can see why people were disappointed with Wolverine now.) The dialogue is better than the previous effort, and Julia Stiles wisely keeps her trap shut for most of it, though promoting her to some kind of love interest / concerned citizen is implausible. Not the least plausible thing here, I grant, but one of the more gratingly incongruous. Won 3 Oscars? #183 in the IMDB top-250? David Strathairn must be hard up for cash; I haven't seen him in anything decent in a long while, and re-heating Brian Cox's role is surely beneath him. Oliver Stone saw so clearly that Joan Allen is Pat Nixon; I only got there afterwards. I was a bit disappointed that one of the assets wasn't Jason Statham.
