Less so is the film's weary, unimaginative descent into treacly sentiment and overblown action sequences, which are supposedly what the kids want these days.
Dheepan comes close to unravelling in its final rather overblown action sequence, which fudges one of its own conditions of suspense: someone with a gun held to the head in one scene, but not the next.
The film is directed by Jonathan Liebesman, but the dead hand of producer Michael Bay is evident in shots of Megan Fox's arse and adverts for Victoria's Secret (the turtles hide themselves in a pair of giant tits – geddit?), along with the flat-as-a-pancake humour, incoherently overblown action sequences and a preponderance of that weirdly dated stuttering Transformers sound effect.
But the norm in this genre is a hodgepodge of adolescent emotions, cheeky humor, cool special effects and overblown action sequences, a formula that can, when the casting is right, make certain specimens (like the first "Iron Man" movie) seem better than they are.
It's one long, fevered montage which rushes from decade to decade, pausing only for its overblown, CGI action sequences.
And though this novel is apparently De Haven's last word on Derby, I wouldn't begrudge him if he reversed himself and expanded the trilogy into a tetralogy: after all, isn't it painfully likely that the suits at DreamWorks, in a characteristic rush of boomer nostalgia, would secure the rights to Derby and hire Robert Zemeckis to make an overblown live-action feature starring Haley Joel Osment?
A second-rate Die Hard knock-off with Gerard Butler playing the Bruce Willis role, Olympus Has Fallen is preposterously overblown, an action movie that seems to prove the old saying: If brains were gunpowder, this movie wouldn't have enough to blow its own nose.
Greengrass rejects the proposition but there is a sense that up against the CGI of superheroes, there is a need to make Bourne superhuman and the action overblown.
The best scenes are not the overblown, skull-assaulting action sequences — which add remarkably little that will be fresh or surprising to devotees of the "Transformers" franchise — but the moments in between, when the assembled heroes have the opportunity to brag, banter, flirt and bicker.
Not only was the movie full of "overblown, skull-assaulting action sequences", he wrote in his review, but its dirty secret was that it was "a snappy little dialogue comedy dressed up as something else, that something else being a giant ATM for Marvel and its new studio overlords, the Walt Disney Company".
The show will feature super slo-mo action replays, overblown graphics, music and scripted comedy analysis.
