There's no way you're going to look at your watch during the nearly two hours of The Bourne Ultimatum. Thrillers this effective are often called "tight," and it's true that this picture doesn't waste a second. But The Bourne Ultimatum, the third in the franchise, is also jittery. Director Paul Greengrass's use of handheld cameras — even in the movie's maybe five minutes of relatively static scenes — and Christopher Rouse's blam-blam-blam editing create a sense of being force-fed triple espresso shots. Most thrillers of this ilk have no qualms about going past the 120-minute mark, but I think Greengrass and company understood that overdoing it would turn mass excitement into massive headache.
Ultimatum begins with Damon's amnesiac C.I.A. super-assassin Jason Bourne hobbling around Moscow and breaking into a pharmacy to self-treat a wound. His training made him handy like that. As he fights the pain, and fights the tormenting memories that come back to him in flashes, some cops confront him. He disables them but doesn't kill them, because his resurfacing "real" personality has decided that he ain't gonna study war no more. Except against those who made him what he "is." Those guys, he's gonna give it to. Once he figures out who they are and how to find them.
The search takes him from London to Spain to Tangier to New York and a couple of places one might miss, the action goes by so fast. His contacts include one ill-fated journalist (Considine) and the Agency functionary Nicky Parsons (Stiles, reprising her role from the two prior films, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy), who finally explains — sort of — her place in the storyline and who also breaks ranks from the C.I.A. to help out Bourne.
As for the C.I.A. itself, Joan Allen's high-ranking character Pamela Landry is also back and more sympathetic to Bourne than she was in Supremacy; here her superiors, Noah Vosen (Strathairn) and Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn), are the baddies. These guys want Bourne, and pretty much anybody he happens to pass by on the street, dead, because they, along with a special guest evil-scientist type, are behind Blackbriar, the covert operation designed to turn certain agents into zombie-like killing machines. These "black ops" and the justifications for them give screenwriters Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, and George Nolfi the opportunity to lace the picture with dialogue that is Relevant to the Situation We Face Today, a kind of sop to those who wish to consider the Bourne pictures as the thinking man's action franchise.
But let's not kid ourselves. This movie's vision of a super-competent (except when it's not), almost entirely malicious C.I.A. going up against the wiles and strengths of a near-invincible, newly righteous former agent is as much a fantasy construct as any Harry Potter tale. Damon's Bourne is more bulked up than in the previous pictures and terser than ever (having your girlfriend killed in the second movie of your franchise does that to you, I'm sure). He might bleed when you prick him, but his almost supernatural abilities as both an escape artist (not to mention escape artist by proxy, as in a scene where he tries to steer Considine's character out of a waiting ambush in the middle of London's Waterloo Station) and a fighter do make him something of a superman. But the improbabilities don't register at all as Greengrass's camera flies with Bourne through an open window in a labyrinthine chase scene that, for the most part, plays out three stories above the ground, or as a Bourne-driven police car flies off a parking-lot roof and sets off a car chase that doesn't end until all the vehicles involved are completely destroyed. These scenes are what the Bourne franchise is really about; the "existential" crisis the Bourne character tries to solve in the pictures is merely the pretext for them.
VIEW: Film photo gallery
READ MORE: Matt Damon Q&A
WATCH THE TRAILER
