Thanks to the Vaughn and Michael (the two guys with whom I traveled to Midland, Texas, and performed on stage at a conference there) I was able to see Ben Stein’s Expelled on opening weekend. The movie screened at one theater in the Midland/Odessa area and both guys were willing to make the 20 minute drive to the theater and watch it with me.

Even better news is that Expelled cracked the top ten for last weekend’s box office receipts pulling in about $3 million. There hasn’t been a peep in the news about it, but, seriously, did anyone expect that there would be?

The movie is spectacular! If you are (or have or know) a student in high school or college, or if you consider yourself “educated,” you really need to see this movie. Ben comes off as the Anti Michael Moore. There are no ambush interviews, no pulling quotes out of context, no tricky re-editing to put words into someone’s mouth. Ben asks simple questions in a very non-confrontational way giving antitheists the rope and allowing them to hang themselves.

This one is a must see, a must own, and a must share.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, you already reviewed two of the three Bournes! You must be completely out of ideas. Now you’re just retreading old content just like Hollywood.”

Well, I never… In fact, this is completely new stuff. Except for the two thirds that I’ve said before. So… nuh huh!

Watching the Pirates trilogy got me in the trilogy mood. (If you haven’t read that review, please do. There’s more retread in that post concerning how trilogies generally work.) As I said before, the Pirates trilogy fell into the trap where episode three is too complicated and contrived trying to tie up all the loose ends. Let’s see how Bourne three does. WARNING: Spoilers appear below.

In Identity we are introduced to Jason Bourne. Poor guy has amnesia, doesn’t know who he is, why he is so adept at kicking butt, or why so many people are availing their butts for him to kick. He hooks up with Trippy German Chick who reluctantly helps him learn more about his past. We learn that Jason was an assassin working for a secret CIA program called Treadstone. The guy running Treadstone is dripping with super-evil-Hollywood-hates-government-guys ickiness. Clearly the bad guy. His boss is slightly less icky and tells him to “take care of the problem” that Bourne represents. Of course, Bourne ends up doing all the care taking and super-icky CIA guy ends up dead. Less-icky CIA guy covers up the mess and shuts down Treadstone. Jason and Trippy-German-Chick live happily ever after. Everybody wins.

I absolutely loved this movie. The action, the acting, the script, everything. I had no complaints about and it earned a very rare and coveted five grin rating.

Now for episode two. Supremacy finds Jason and Trippy German Chick living the good life in rural India where out of nowhere somebody comes to kill them. Trippy German Chick takes a bullet intended for Bourne. Now, if you’ve seen Braveheart, you know that if they kill the girl in the first half hour, there’s going to be some serious retribution. Bourne does not disappoint.

Remember good ol’ Less Icky CIA guy? Turns out he’s more icky than we thought. (Insert huge gasp of sarcastic non-surprise.) Bourne assumes that Treadstone is back in action. Insert Non-Icky CIA Chick who fights against the red tape and uncovers Treadstone. Now More Icky CIA Guy sets a record for how many different ways you can say, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.” This time it turns out Treadstone is not the bad guy per se. Instead, Now More Icky CIA Guy himself has his hands dirty with Russian mafia and he used Bourne to do a hit for the Russkies. Now the Russkies decide to “taken care of the problem” just in case Bourne gets his memory back and exposes their mafianess.

Bourne exposes Now More Icky CIA Guy who takes the coward’s way out (i.e. .32 caliber lobotomy). The Russkies get arrested by the Russian police. (But we all know that didn’t last. C’mon. Russian mafia in a Russian jail? Get real.) And Non-Icky CIA Chick and Bourne have an intimate phone call before Jason disappears. Everybody wins.

Supremacy was a perfect sequel. It was a little bit better than Identity in every way. So naturally, it also earned five grins.

So we’ve come down to it. Will episode three work? Episode two didn’t really leave you hanging on anything, so there’s no contrived lose ends to wrap up… or are there?

I really liked how episode three picked up within minutes of the end of episode two. Bourne has the same injuries and is on the same street that we saw him on as the credits rolled on Supremacy. (Thus reinforcing my opinion that you really get the most out of series movies when you watch them in order within days of each other.) So, if Treadstone is truly dead, both bad CIA guys are gone, the Russkies are in jail, and Bourne is walking free, why are we here? Well. Wouldn’t you know there still people intent on killing Jason Bourne. A pesky newspaper guy has dug deeper than he was supposed to and publishes some stuff about Bourne. Bigger Ickier CIA Boss is really mad about it. Non-Icky CIA Chick is in big trouble for letting Bourne go. Now it’s her job to find him again (and “take care of the problem”) before he and Pesky Newspaper Guy meet up and publish even more stuff not suitable for public consumption. Here’s were things start to stray away from the previous episodes.

We see the CIA machine from the inside, agents appearing out of nowhere, computer wizes hacking into mall surveillance cameras, and Even Ickier CIA Guy ordering CIA Killer to “take ’em out!” It seems much less cloak-and-dagger and much more all-out-war. Non-Icky CIA Chick is as taken aback as we are. When she objects, she gets (surprise surprise) “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.” Turns out Treadstone is now reborn as Blackbriar and Pesky Newspaper Guy has found someone within Blackbriar willing to talk about it. Pesky Newspaper Guy is “dealt with” but Bourne gets away.

Now we’re basically back where we started in episode one. Bourne knows who he is this time, sort of but not really. Now he’s looking for the guy who programmed him. The CIA secret program is trying to kill him. A girl gets involved and has to live on the run. It’s all too familiar.

Still, the acting is brilliant. The action is amazing. The plot is… pretty good, if a little more predictable now that we know the story. Ultimatum ends feeling a bit like a remake rather than a sequel. It still manages to come off as a bit contrived. For that, I’m going to have to dock a couple of grins.

Does Bourne fall victim to the trilogy pitfalls? It’s not a story in three acts (you don’t have a downer act two), so it’s a continually building story. That opens it up for the should have left it alone pitfall (a la Back to the Future, Highlander, and Lethal Weapon). Episode two was better than episode one, but episode three was a bit shaky. I prefer to look at it this way. The first two were off the chart. They got five grins for Pete’s sake! There’s no six grin rating. You can’t beat ’em. When you’ve set the bar as high as it can go, it can only get worse. I don’t fault Ultimatum for not maintaining nearly unattainable awesomeness. The Bourne trilogy is just a casualty of it’s own success.

It came to my attention when I was doing some maintenance on my blog that there as been a serious breech of protocol. It turns out that I have, in fact, published 132 white board quips, NOT 129. Somehow I managed to not count three quips.

So, I must take drastic action and pronounce this week’s quip #133. Rather than going back and editing fifty or sixty old posts to get them up to the correct counts, we’ll just say that quips 130, 131, and 132 were victims of poor accounting and lost to the ether.

I always win. Except when I lose, but then I just don’t count it.

[Ed. Oh, who am I kidding. I can’t stand to leave this alone. I’m going to go back and fix the old ones!! OCD wins again.]