10 Great Movies That Were Almost Ruined By Bad Editing

The third Bourne movie Ultimatum continued the success of the all-action spy franchise, with Rotten Tomatoes calling it the finest installment in the trilogy and giving it a Certified Fresh score of 93%. This was another white-knuckle ride from start to finish, with British director Paul Greengrass the man at the wheel, directing with the pedal to the metal.

The trouble with Ultimatum is that the journey Greengrass intended to take us on got distorted in the editing room. The shaky handheld cam technique can make for a challenging watch at the best of times, but when done wrong it quickly goes from immersive to irritating.

Such was the case with The Bourne Ultimatum, in which the titular rogue agent could have been wielding a banana in place of a gun half the time for all we could see. In fact, RogerEbert.com received so many frustrated letters on the matter that they published a number of them on their website.

Some will argue that this is an issue that should be taken up with the cinematographer, though that isn't the case here. Oliver Wood was the man behind the shaky cam, though he also teamed with Greengrass on the previous Bourne film Supremacy, which used the same techniques but to greater effect. In fact, Supremacy actually had a faster average shot length, with 1.9 seconds against Ultimatum's 2 second average.

The pace of the editing is not the issue here: the quality of it is. Whereas cuts had been smooth in the previous film, here the editing seemed jagged, interrupting actions and camera movements as opposed to blending them together. Not one pan, zoom, or movement of any kind is allowed to come to rest before the shot changes, creating a subtle visual imbalance that almost ruined an otherwise great movie.