Matt Damon’s first two “Bourne” adventures were a breath of fresh air for a stale action genre, even if they helped bring the Shaky Cam Era into the 21st century. But that third installment, 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum,” made it clear the franchise needed to end.

Nuthin’ doing. Hollywood simply found a new actor to take over.

Jeremy Renner,  the steely presence in “The Town” and “The Hurt Locker,” officially becomes the face of the franchise in this summer’s “The Bourne Legacy.”

No Damon, no worries if this clip is any indication. But we’re still looking for a reason to keep the franchise alive.

The new film finds another amnesia patient (Renner) who gets involved in a government program that reeks of inappropriate behavior. That’s being kind, and we’ll have to wait and see if the film offers up some sucker punches to conservative crowds.

For now, let’s enjoy the sublime supporting cast – franchise newbies Edward Norton and Rachel Weisz plus returnees Albert Finney, Joan Walsh, David Strathairn and Scott Glenn.

“Bourne” screenwriter Tony Gilroy takes over behind the camera, and while the trailer seems too pleased with its black bar visuals we don’t see as much hand-held camera works as in past installments.

That’s a relief. If you’re going to reboot a franchise, it’s high time to bring a new visual approach to the material.

In “Ghost Protocol,” the fourth installment of this 15-year-old franchise, Tom Cruise—short of hits in the five years since the last film in the series—returns as Ethan Hunt, star agent of the Impossible Mission Force, that U.S. government espionage squad dedicated to squashing colorful malefactors in picturesque locations around the world.

This time out, Hunt has a new team: brainy-hot Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton, smart choice); displaced intel analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, over-qualified for this sort of exercise); and, also back again, tech wiz and comic-relief specialist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Their target: nuclear terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist, of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” movies), whose rather Bondian ambition is to destroy the world and then rebuild it into a new, improved, presumably more Hendricks-centric society.

The story begins inauspiciously. Hunt is confined in a Moscow prison, for reasons we don’t learn till much later. Carter and Dunn bust him out, and they all set off in search of the nuclear launch codes that are a key component of Hendricks’ scheme.

Read the full review at Reason.com

Various Hollywood professionals who support the military like actors Robert Duvall Jeremy Renner, Kelsey Grammer, Rick Schroeder, Glenn Close and JAG’s Karri Turner, as well as directors and producers like Ron Maxwell and Lou Reda, are often in attendance. CSI: New York and Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan,  Academy Award-nominated Gary Sinise, will host a reception for Congressional members who have served, or who are currently serving in the U.S. Military. With veterans on both he and his wife’s side of their families, Sinise has been an active supporter of the festival since its inception, as he has of so many other pro-military causes. This year actor William Devane will premiere the drama Flag of My Father at the festival’s Hollywood Patriots Night and a salute to International Warriors will host military films from several other countries.

Last year at I wrote a piece for Big Hollywood highly critical of box-office and morale-killing Hollywood military films like The Green Zone that have dominated movie screens. Well, the G.I. Film Festival has been out front in the battle for positive depictions of the military since it started back in 2007. Festival creators, husband and wife Brandon Millett and Major Laura Law-Millett, first created the festival to combat the continuing inaccurate and negative stereotypes that Hollywood has so often fostered about the United States Armed Forces. In an interview with the Washington Post during the launch of the first G.I. Film Festival, Major Law offered up that, “In movie after movie all you see then was soldiers raping and killing. We want to show something more positive.”

Her husband Brandon emphasized that, “We wanted to do something to focus public attention on the courage and selflessness of the American soldiers.”

The chairman of the festival, former naval officer Steve Bannon, is also an award-winning filmmaker, successful entertainment company president, and proud father of a West Point graduate who is currently serving her country as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne. “It was a spark of genius when Brandon and Major Law-Millett started this festival five years ago. They saw the need and said, ‘We just have to do this.’ Every year they personally go out of their way to find the best films.” Bannon told me a few days ago.

Bannon points out knowingly, “In the 242 years of our history, this is only the second time besides World War II that this country has been involved in two wars at the same time. The G. I. Film Festival works against the Hollywood fads because telling great stories about the American fighting man, their families, their triumphs and their tragedies is never out of fashion.”

On Friday May 13th Bannon will share his considerable film industry knowledge in a day long filmmaker’s “boot camp” that will also feature other experienced film industry professionals. “We’ve got young G.I. filmmakers and older vets, as well as pro-military filmmakers who have never served. They’re all trying to find their voice. We want to provide access for them so they can learn their craft and get their films out there.” Says Bannon. “With the technology available today, it doesn’t matter how old or young you are. We can find you technical people for support to help them out.”

The festival has grown from 22 juried and selected films its first first year to 31 top quality films this year selected from over 200 submissions. Over the last five years a handful of the best military-themed projects have received such high praise and notice that they were rewarded with theatrical distribution deals. Excellent military themed films like Operation Homecoming, The Last 600 Meters and Brothers at War made it onto theater or television screens, in no small part because of their positive reception at the G.I. Film Festival. Recently the festival signed a deal with Discovery’s Military Channel to feature the top festival films on that popular cable military channel.

“We want to get these films and filmmakers the broadest possible exposure and our arrangement with Discovery’s Military Channel does just that.” Says Festival chairman Bannon.

Stand by at Big Hollywood over this week for reports on some the G. I. Film Festival’s best films and featured events.

The FBI has singled out Charlestown and its one-square-mile radius as the area of America that has produced more bank robbers than any other place in the nation. And in his new movie “The Town,” Ben Affleck plays Doug MacRay, who leads a gang of thieves even as his conscience gnaws at him and makes him want to walk away from the thug life. Yet, it’s the only life he knows, since his father (played by Chris Cooper in a harrowing one-scene cameo) is rotting in prison on five life sentences for crossing the line by killing a guard on one of his own robberies.

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Seeing his father waste away and watching his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) walk ever closer to the edge of killing innocent victims himself, Affleck is working up the nerve to get out once and for all when Jem takes a young bank executive named Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage amid the film’s opening heist. The gang later learns she lives smack in the middle of their neighborhood and fear that she might recognize them, so Doug volunteers to test a meeting with her and see if their masks were effective.

Seeing her shaken by the traumatic aftereffects of the robbery, and realizing she doesn’t know he was involved, Doug starts to hang out with her out of genuine interest and soon falls for her. Dreaming of finally having someone to run away with, Doug is ready to make his stand – until twist after twist after twist start to unfold and unravel his best intentions.

Coming within a month of the wildly entertaining “Takers” and the brutally realistic French double-feature gangster epic “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” and “Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One,” it’s easy to think that “The Town” is just another product of the Hollywood assembly line. Yet as good as the other three heist films are, “The Town” has far greater ambitions and, with Affleck at the helm as director and co-writer, it achieves every one of them.

The key to “The Town”’s superiority lies in its heart. Where “Takers” occasionally has a glimpse of the deeper emotions roiling beneath the surface of its thieves, most of the film consists slickly executed plotting and a vibrant surface sheen. “Mesrine” is basically a French “Scarface,” piling on one extravagantly brutal and jaw-dropping crime sequence after another while barely taking a breath.

Affleck, meanwhile, has imbued “The Town” with a palpable sense of sadness. Everyone involved wants to better their lives, but just don’t know how to do it right. But, even as Doug MacRay finds himself having to act utterly ruthless at times, the dark family secrets that drive him – that may sound like a cliché, but Affleck and his co-writers Aaron Stockard and Peter Craig make them brilliantly, powerfully real – come spilling out to his newfound soulmate, making viewers root for him to find a way out at all costs.

Every aspect of “The Town” is thoroughly thought out, starting with the intricate comparisons of how the robbers plan their attacks and how the FBI agents (led by Jon Hamm) seek to counteract them. Add in searing performances from a stellar cast, gritty cinematography by Oscar-winner Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”) and an eclectic score by Harry Gregson-Williams and David Buckley that combines traditional Irish melodies with pulse-pounding rock, and the result is a film that shakes viewers to the core.

From a moral perspective, “The Town” is often messy to consider. Doug may be nicer than the other guys in his gang, but they’re still robbing banks and threatening people’s lives in the course of doing so. His relationship with Claire is rooted in a lie, though he does strive to make good on that later. The language is definitely R-rated, though the foul stuff mostly occurs amid robbery action, while the film’s many thoughtful moments are rendered tastefully, and the one sex scene is show in deep shadow with only Affleck exposed and from the waist up.

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT:

Yet as the final job, a daring robbery of Fenway Park after a gold-mine weekend of Red Sox-Yankee games, spins out of control, MacRay is also popping the trigger on automatic weapons aimed at the Boston police. The film unequivocally wants the audience to root for him, which demands cheering on wrongdoing, although he ultimately gives up most of the money in a way that touchingly helps others and helps himself finally achieve closure on his tortured past.

This is Affleck’s second writer-directorial effort (the other was the also-terrific “Gone Baby Gone” in 2007) since he realized that he had to find a way out of the crushing pressures of his early fame. He knew he had to retrench to his Oscar-winning (for “Good Will Hunting”) skills as a writer to reclaim respect after a string of critical and box-office duds. It is that drive that clearly connects him to the passionate heart of Doug MacRay, and here’s hoping he keeps finding more dream projects to pursue.

The Hurt Locker is not about Iraq, why we went there, what we did when we got there, or whether we should have gone in the first place. It is not about American foreign policy or domestic disagreement over that policy; it’s not even about soldiers or their qualities or character …  it’s not about politics at all.

The Hurt Locker is about an adrenaline junkie who gets off defusing bombs.

Sgt. Will James is very good at this narrow work. He is occasionally a fool who takes unnecessary chances. Far more often he is an expert who enjoys that his wisely bold tactics occasionally make him appear a fool—because a fool’s luck has nothing to do with his success. Early in the picture and after much prodding, Sgt. James admits to a superior officer that he has defused “873 bombs, counting today.”

Nobody’s luck is that good.

This is a telling scene for another reason: He’s happy for the recognition, but painfully shy about it, too. He fairly leaps from the truck to reply to the officer—but it’s because his inquisitor is an officer, not because the question will give him a moment of glory. The officer, played by the always interesting David Morse, has to pry the information out of him and turn it into a boast on Sgt. James’ behalf. Morse’s officer is so unabashedly enthusiastic with his praise that we’re not sure—and apparently neither is Sgt. James—if it is genuine, or a set-up to a dressing-down for the apparently insane risks he’s just taken.

The little-known (for now), Jeremy Renner plays Sgt. James, and he plays him like a guy who would enjoy solving a Rubik’s Cube while sitting on a high-wire over a pit of rabid alligators. Renner’s James is incapable of simply existing. Every moment must be a deadline or the run-up to some test. In his off-hours he plays punch-out with another soldier, and not just for the sake of taking a punch. The two are working through a grudge right out in the open. He creates a brief mission for himself that can have no benefits in its outcome aside from having survived on the quality of its execution. He looks for reasons to get next to live bombs, once on the pretext of rescuing a pair of entirely disposable gloves. Yet even this has more danger attached to it than anyone first thinks, but Sgt. James knows (at least, I think he does), and gets off on the errand all the more because of it.

The Hurt Locker is also a good-looking picture. For instance, the shots of explosions are carried out much more thoughtfully than with the standard “cover it with cameras” action-picture approach. Director Kathryn Bigelow (whose last great pictures were 20 years ago—Blue Steel and Point Break) shoots the gravelly ground rising in slow motion; she gets the shuddering and the debris exactly right (again, as someone like me who hasn’t seen this stuff for real will imagine they should look)—there is never an obvious, go-for-broke FX shot for its own sake here. At times our view of the explosions is mostly one-off detail, and rather than distracting us from the moment, it enhances how we perceive it. That is the purpose of good direction and good camera work: not to draw attention to itself, but to enhance the story.

Which is a little ironic, because The Hurt Locker is not a story at all, but a character study. It is rare that a character study is carried out with so much expert attention to making a truly engaging and entertaining picture. The Hurt Locker is an apolitical and very entertaining movie about a very interesting man.

Produced and scripted by Mark Boal (who embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad operating in Baghdad), the year is 2004 and Iraq is a country under siege, thanks mainly to determined insurgents and roadside IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that seem to be everywhere and frequently come with nearby triggermen lying in wait for the opportunity to do the most amount of damage, preferably to American servicemen and women.  Charged with the dangerous and technically complicated job of defusing these bombs is a three-man EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team led by Staff Sergeant James (an excellent Jeremy Renner) and his squad mates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty).

The opening scene’s a wowser, and the 40 minutes that follow do their job in setting up characters, their relationships and at least giving off the appearance that we’re headed towards something bigger involving Beckham, a young Iraqi boy who sells DVDs on the base. When this storyline strangely pans out to be much ado about nothing, the plot slowly deflates into a series well-staged but interchangeable episodes with no over-arching story. You’re about an hour in when you start to feel the 130 minute runtime.

Every time “Locker” starts to weave any kind of spell something unnecessarily political comes along to break it. Mostly the sucker punches come at the end of a scene as if to say, “That will teach you for buying into it.”  A tense sequence involving an Iraqi cabdriver who runs a roadblock ends with our troopers roughly handcuffing him. This superfluous drama appears to have been filmed only to allow James to give this Leftist belief an airing, “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.”

And that’s just the beginning.

Most troubling is a frighteningly unstable, near-psychotic field commander, Colonel Reed (David Morse), who orders his men to let a wounded Iraqi civilian/suspect bleed out to death even after he’s informed the man could easily be saved with a simple radio call. After watching James work, Reed approaches him with crazy eyes gushing over what a “wild man” he is. Not only is this a monstrous depiction of an American Colonel, it’s faulty storytelling. Morse is a recognizable actor and the disturbing impression his character makes is so strong you keep expecting him to return – maybe even as the film’s antagonist.

Reed isn’t the only officer to take a hit. Christian Camargo plays the utterly clueless Colonel Cambridge, a therapist assigned to help Eldridge deal with battlefield trauma. He chirps cheerily, “Going to war is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It could be fun.”

The worst, however, comes near the end. In a moment of tender humanity James risks his life to treat the body of a dead Iraqi — who may or may not be someone he knows — with respect and care. But again, we’re not allowed a pure moment presenting our troops as they are. Instead we cut to Sanford and Eldridge – two characters we’ve come to admire – only to hear this coldly matter-of-fact exchange regarding the dead Iraqi: You think that’s the “little base rat?” “I don’t know man, they all look the same.”

Not one of these moments, and there are a handful of others, is in anyway necessary to the plot or the understanding of these characters. In a movie that’s already twenty-minutes too long, what motivated Bigelow to hang on to them in a film eager to be touted as being “above politics” is beyond me.

In a throwback to Hollywood’s stereotyped depiction of unstable Vietnam vets, the Iraq War has turned our protagonist, James, into an increasingly reckless adrenaline junkie whose disregard for safety and communication protocol puts everyone around him in danger. After defusing  873 of these things, James is certainly comfortable getting off cowboying around any kind of explosives he might come across (and enjoying a cigarette afterwards),  but he’s also a victim of this war, for he’s no longer in control of his own destiny. The film opens on the words “War is a drug,” and that drug is all James desires. So warped by war, even when looking into his infant son’s eyes, James can say out loud that there’s only one thing he loves … and it’s not the boy.

As the plot plods on James becomes increasingly reckless, eventually leading Eldridge and Sanborn on a night-time hunt for a single suspect through a dangerous urban neighborhood with about a million hiding places. James is beyond audacious now, he’s foolhardy and dangerous and this thoughtless venture results in the near-kidnapping of one of his own men who ends up severely wounded – and this wounded man speaks for all of us when he says, “We didn’t have to go out looking for trouble to get you your adrenaline fix, YOU FUCK!”

But because James has no character arc, he learns nothing from this tragic outing. He’s a slave to this drug … to war, an unprofessional loose cannon who can’t love his son, can’t function in the real world and is on a trajectory to either kill himself, or worse, someone else.  Like any junkie, he’s capable of humanity and leadership, he’s no coward and he knows his job, but he’s a victim to this thing and when we leave him we know it can’t end pretty.

It’s too bad the Iraqi people aren’t a protected class among Leftists. Of course, Leftists spent years lobbying in every imaginable way to abandon 25 million of them to death squads and terrorists, so why should it come as a surprise that Michael Bay’s satire of rap culture earns some outrage but “Hurt Locker” gets a pass.

The women are portrayed as either cannon fodder or screaming like savages, and other than a short, strange encounter with a man who wonders if James is CIA, the men are alternately terrorists, a menacing presence, victims, the butt of jokes or utterly clueless. The only Iraqi with a hint of personality is Beckam, but he’s never given a dimension beyond that of a hustler poisoned by our crass American consumer culture, “Wassup, my nigga…?  Want the cool shit?  I hook you up. Donkeykong? Gay sex…? Gangsta. Hey, man, fuck you!”

No, I’ve never been in the military, but when a film’s over I surely know what my opinion of the characters just portrayed up on that screen is, and I’ve seen this movie twice now trying to reconcile how everything listed above can add up to most every review labeling “The Hurt Locker” as “apolitical.”

Has Hollywood so worn us out that we’ve dumbed “apolitical” down to the point where this portrayal of our Iraqi allies, our troops and the officers who lead them qualifies? I’m not looking for John Wayne and I get battlefield cynicism. “Blackhawk Down” and “Brothers at War” do just fine by me. But when the men in the ranks display cold, casual racism, an American Colonel savagely orders that an Iraqi be left to bleed to death and a profoundly unprofessional protagonist, so demented by war he can no longer love his own son, repeatedly endangers himself and the men in his charge, I don’t see “nuance” or “depth” or “complicated” characters. What I see is politics of the worst kind.

The junkets are simple. You sit in a hotel room with other writers and one by one the film’s participants stop by for a few minutes. So, in no particular order, as a group we had the chance to interview Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal (“In the Valley of Elah”), who researched the film in Iraq, and actors Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty.

All were charming and personable to be sure, but whenever politics or previous Iraq War films came up, things would get a little tense and surreal as each responded by assuring us they weren’t worried because “Hurt Locker” wasn’t at all political. Again and again, the film was described as a straight-forward war picture that just happened to be set in Iraq.

Obviously with these anti-Iraq films flopping at a resounding 100% rate, you can understand why the subject was uncomfortable, but the disconnect between the film I saw just a few days earlier and what the participants seemed to sincerely believe was an apolitical action film, was striking.

Here are some of the story beats. [minor spoiler warning]

The film opens declaring its theme in writing: War is a Drug.

Renner [pictured above] plays Staff Sergeant William James, a soldier unable to function in the real world or sustain a normal relationship with his family, including a young child. War’s turned him into a reckless adrenaline addict who constantly puts himself and the men he’s in charge of in danger when defusing IEDs.

Actor David Morse has a cameo as a field commander, Colonel Reed, who’s portrayed as sadistic and slightly unstable. After an Iraqi civilian/suspect is shot, Reed’s informed the man’s life can be saved if medics are called in immediately. Reed refuses to even consider it, and as the dying man bleeds out, exhibits an unsettling admiration for James’s cowboy ways.

After an Iraqi cab driver (who inexplicably plowed through a road block) is roughly subdued, James says to the troopers handcuffing him, “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.”

As the armored vehicle carrying our protagonists passes by, a group of Iraqi children angrily hurl rocks at them.

Naturally, there’s the “They all look alike” remark directed at the Iraqi people by one of the leads.

And the Iraqi people get the worst of it. Something all these anti-war films share in common is a refusal to put a real human face on the people our military are fighting and dying for (this is the case in many anti-Vietnam war films, as well). To do so, to give the Iraqis humanity, works against the abandon-them-to-embarrass-George Bush goal. So instead of portraying them as people — as real, relatable human beings worthy of support and liberty — they’re stripped of humanity and turned into story-props: Villains, victims, foul-mouthed hustlers, or strange alien beings who keep an awkward distance and mourn the dead by yelling savagely at the sky.

Director Kathryn Bigelow

During the interviews, I didn’t press these specifics. They were emphatic the film was apolitical, so the question could only come off as argumentative. Besides, the plot points speak for themselves. How I interpret them is my opinion. Others may feel different. But I did ask everyone the actors what they thought drove the men who volunteered for the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) squad, which, though obviously dangerous, is difficult to get accepted into because of the skill level and personality requirements.

Only Renner (who memorably portrayed a heroic soldier in “28 Weeks Later“) had an answer. He remarked that the EOD personnel he spent time with while preparing for the role enjoyed the work and the bump in pay. It also offered unique career opportunities after military life was over. That’s a perfectly good answer and no doubt true.

However, the rest looked as though no one had ever asked that question before, which is interesting. You would think that this very “motivation” would be the prime characteristic in creating the foundation of the characters. This and the film’s actual portrayal of these characters makes clear that a sense of duty or a selfless desire to help others and serve a cause bigger than one’s self wasn’t a motivation remotely near the universe of anyone’s consideration.

To their credit, when it came to the military, all the participants spoke with respect, but there was certainly a disconnect, and it shows in the film.

“The Hurt Locker” starts it theatrical roll-out June 26th.

My review will post next week.

UPDATE: June 15th 7:37 a.m.: While preparing a follow-up interview, I reviewed the recordings of the junket and have updated the post to correct a misintepretation of my notes.

The film’s second trailer hit the Internet today and, as I sit here wearing my (apparently passe) Camp Liberty t-shirt, I must say it looks pretty good.

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Billed as the “first non-political Iraq War film,” “Hurt Locker” follows the story of Staff Sergeant William James, a maverick bomb removal expert who leads a team trying to save lives – including their own.

It was directed by Kathryn Bigalow, who is herself something of a maverick.

Bigalow has made her name in Hollywood as one of the only female directors of action films. Her credits include “K19: The Widowmaker,” “Point Break” and “Strange Days.”

That experience is evident in the trailer. Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James is just the type of iconoclast Bigalow identifies with. Plus, the explosions look great.

The film received strong reviews on the Fall film fest circuit, especially for Renner’s “career-making” turn as James.

It will be released on June 26 so the rest of us can judge for ourselves.