Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

The Bourne Ultimatum

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Jason Bourne is an action hero without accessories — Batman without the utility belt, Bond without the suave tuxedo, MacGyver without the mullet. As in The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, he doesn’t rely on gadgetry or a back-up team in The Bourne Ultimatum. Using his head and whatever is at hand, Matt Damon turns off his megawatt smile to portray a grim man in search of his past. Without the high body count made convenient by endless bullets, the covert nature of the Bourne trilogy requires most corpses to crumple in corners, rather than launch slow-mo into a backdrop of explosions. With prologue and character development already established, director Paul Greengrass alternates choreographed fight sequences with political intrigue for a rapid-paced rush towards the disclosure of Bourne’s true identity.
    Greengrass reintroduces Bourne as an American secret agent fighting to infiltrate the CIA, the organization that trained him before moving him to the top of its most-wanted list. In this third Bourne film, a journalist chasing a story catches Bourne’s attention and unwittingly lures him out of hiding and into a final search for the truth of his origin. From the first scene in which Bourne manoeuvres through a London transit station using only his ingenuity while the camera zooms around him, the suspense never lets up, nor is it slaughtered in the standard spray of gunfire. Aside from a requisite car chase with accompanying explosions, Bourne kills intimately, pressing gun barrels against heads and twisting hand towels to parry punches while Greengrass keeps the camera close.
    Not all of Bourne’s enemies fight with fists and sniper rifles. The supporting cast spends most of the film in CIA control rooms, eyes swerving from monitors to cellphones, mimicking Bourne’s hide and seek with a verbal cat and mouse game. Joan Allen gives a polished performance as Pamela Landy, Bourne’s unlikely ally on the inside, and David Strathairn’s Noah Vosen seethes seediness as the power-hungry agent who asserts “it ends when we win.” Julia Stiles, who can’t act her way out of a body bag, plays Nicky Parsons, useful only for initiating a flashback and a computer hook-up before disappearing until the finale. Besides this small casting slip-up, however, Damon’s and the rest of the cast’s precision and somberness keeps the emotional pressure simmering beneath the action sequences. Allen’s and Strathairn’s behind-the-scenes sparring provides enough exposition to explain what’s going on with Bourne before the camera sweeps back to the never-ending string of chase sequences.
    Between the bureaucratic tension escalating through conspiratorial phone calls and the exhilarating rooftop chase scenes, The Bourne Ultimatum offers both a befitting end to the series and a clean introduction to Jason Bourne. Loyal fans and first-timers can expect the same excitement in this latest instalment, and the occasional clichéd repartée or irrelevant character can easily be forgiven. The crisp plot is straightforward without stepping over the line into ubiquitous predictability, and Bourne’s desire to discover his true self proves more compelling than any gimmick.