Film Review: “The Bourne Ultimatum”

If Alfred Hitchcock were alive and directing action films today, they'd probably look a whole lot like Paul Greengrass’ masterful spy thriller “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Those who enjoyed the first two chapters (Doug Liman’s “The Bourne Identity” and Greengrass' “The Bourne Supremacy”) will have a ball with this third and final entry. Forget that it's a sequel to a sequel and ignore the fact that the film has next to no connection to its Robert Ludlum source material -- “The Bourne Ultimatum” still stands as one of the most rousing action movies in years.

Need proof that $100 million dollars worth of digital and CGI trickery isn’t needed to create an action spectacle that will have moviegoers cheering? Here it is. How novel to find an action film that delivers thrills and intensity through character and story instead of eye-candy and explosions. Simple to follow but just twisted enough to sink your teeth into.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is in constant motion, racing down streets and along corridors, leaping across rooftops. Intimate with many cities -- Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid -- and, incapable of hesitation, he runs without a stumble though their mazelike neighborhoods, markets, and railroad stations. No office or hotel-room door remains impenetrable; no safe remains locked. Robert Ludlum created the character -- in his 1980 novel, “The Bourne Identity” -- as a black-ops assassin whose brain had been wiped clean before he was programmed to kill. The writers who adapted Bourne for the screen (Tony Gilroy has been a regular, along with various collaborators) took over Ludlum’s notion for the character; they enhanced Bourne’s locomotive skills, and gave him a soul. This Jason Bourne is so anguished by his crimes that he develops amnesia, but he gradually remembers the bad things he has done, and is haunted by them.

Because the viewer actually cares about Jason Bourne's plight -- and, like him, craves some big answers -- the action moments feel like natural extensions of the story, rather than a collection of stand-alone set-pieces that were wedged into the plot wherever they'd fit. It feels good to breeze along with an extended action scene and actually not know where it's headed. The Bourne series has already shown that it doesn't always play by the rules (recall the fate of Franka Potente's character in “Supremacy”), and that adds another layer of flavor to the mayhem: some of the characters you like actually could die.

Hats off to producer Frank Marshall for keeping this trilogy moving ahead in confident fashion. Along with Liman, Greengrass, Damon, Gilroy, and hundreds of other contributors, the producer has done the near-impossible: He has delivered a trilogy that has no weak entry.

The film’s plot goes something like this: London journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) stumbles onto a hyper-secret CIA black op code named Blackbriar.

It's so sensitive the whisper of it on Ross' cell phone sets sinister surveillance technology abuzz an ocean away in midtown Manhattan.

There the Blackbriar leak sparks the attention of a Bush-league spook, Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), and Pam Landry (Joan Allen), the honorable but tough-as-nails CIA bureaucrat from 2004's “Supremacy” who, in the last moments of that film, told Bourne his birth name.

Thing is, that still hasn't happened yet -- “Ultimatum” actually kicks off in Moscow following Bourne's confession to a young Russian girl whose parents he murdered and his putting paid to Franka’s killer. Still racked by flashbacks to his vicious past -- filled with more post-9/11 imagery than ever before -- Bourne's search for his identity leads him to Ross and, consequently, to Vosen.

From here, Greengrass piggybacks jaw-dropping set piece on jaw-dropping set piece. When the ever-resourceful Bourne sets up a meet with Ross at London's Waterloo Station, he puppeteers the reporter through corridors and crowds to evade a rapidly-tightening network of operatives and video surveillance cameras linked via satellite to Vosen's hi-tech hub.

Yet the man unerringly pulling all the strings here is Greengrass, whose faculty for electrifying -- yet never disorienting -- chases and clashes is staggering. A mind-blowing mid-point chase over the rooftops of Tangier and an intimate hand-to-hand fight to the end that ends in stunned silence are among the film’s highlights.

Yet throughout, the director of “United 93” never loses his focus, or the emotionalism hard-wired into Bourne's search for both self and redemption.

By the time he locates his objective -- found amid the skyscrapers of New York -- we're as invested in finding the truth as he is.

And just as exhausted.

Bourne’s primary foe, Noah Vosen, who has a whittled honest voice, makes a devastating no-nonsense villain: he seems efficient, capable, a man born to lead people -- right off an ethical cliff. Landry has been involved with this Bourne caper long enough to know that Bourne isn’t a monster, just a ruthless assassin. She wants to hear his side of the story. True, he has a damaging tape that could blow the cover of a sensitive program. But, she reasons, “if he really wanted to hurt us he could have sent the tape to CNN.”

Vosen is forever urging and barking -- “He’s on the move, gimmee eyeballs on the street, let’s go”-- while his analyst Geek Squad storms their computers following Bourne around the world via surveillance cameras and intercepted phone signals.

In chasing the British reporter, Vosen orders, “I want his phones, his BlackBerry…I want to know what he’s gonna think before he does.” Half a second later, the thing is done.

A big pleasure is the fantasy that the CIA is a swooping, roaring, unstoppable force able to summon the darkest magic out of a clear blue sky -- when they need an “asset,” or assassin, at Waterloo Station in London, he’s there instantly, in just the right place, perfectly hidden, with his trusty sniper gear. Back in the real world, we have 50 years worth of reasons to suspect that the CIA is a place where bored nine-to-fivers in poly-blend shirts sit at crumb-covered desks silently calculating their pensions. Find Bin Laden? Track Al-Qaida activity Stateside? When?

The greatest of pleasures, though, is in watching Bourne work -- you can see him observing, thinking, planning, reacting, as CIA baddies swarm in from every direction. The script never cheats its way out by giving him a fancy gadget -- buying a prepaid cellphone is one of the smartest things he does -- and it doesn’t stop for jokey one-liners or cooing romance. Chasing the source who gave the reporter the story about him brings Boune to Madrid, where he again runs into the young CIA field support officer, Nicky Parsons, (Julia Stiles) who started to believe in him in the last movie. Emotions underlie the looks she gives Bourne, but shooting her a glance is as close as Bourne gets to undressing her. This budding romance may be saved for later if Marshall comes out with more Bourne films. I’ll watch ‘em if they’re all this good.

Bourne is no James Bond. Even though last year’s “Casino Royale” was a tremendously satisfying entry, 007’s films don’t stand up to the Bourne series’ brute velocity. As Greengrass thrusts his trademark shaky camera into his spies’ faces, stages gripping fistfights without music or unnecessary cuts, hurls you across the rooftops of Tangier or demonstrates the art of crunchily driving a stolen police car backwards off the roof of the Port Authority, he always makes you feel the temperature, and it’s boiling hot. A whiff of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo makes the film feel current, but Greengrass doesn’t quite dump us back in reality by overselling the parallel.

There isn’t a syllable of excess dialogue -- Damon seems to have about 10 lines in the whole movie -- and Bourne’s real-time scheming makes you smile with its brilliance, if not its plausibility. When a bomb exploded half an SUV length away, one wonders how Bourne bounds away without so much as a chapped lip? When he finally comes back to New York with score-settling on his mind and is trapped in a building overflowing with adversaries, Greengrass glosses over the escape plan and shows Bourne trotting out of the place.

Greengrass shoots the film’s scenes in tiny fragments, leading to an extraordinary gain in speed and power most other directors would have trouble matching. The camera trembles and shakes and hurtles in “Ultimatum,” as if we were trapped inside the moving Bourne, and yet, on the fly, we see what we need to see. Gathering the fragments, Greengrass keeps some of the chase scenes going for ten minutes at a time.

Summing up the first two films: the drama of “Identity” was existential (Who am I?), and the drama of “Supremacy” was moral (What did I do?). The drama of “Ultimatum” is redemptive: How can I escape what I am? This is illustrated when Bourne has a shot on a CIA assassin in New York who failed to kill him, but he passes it up. The same operative later comes back to hold Borne at gunpoint as he’s poised to dive into the Hudson River and escape. After asking why Bourne passed up the shot, the operative lets him jump.

The creators of the black-ops program that created Bourne are shown to have used such techniques as hooding and waterboarding to break down and remake his personality, and he wants to find them. Commenting acidly on current interrogation techniques, the filmmakers suggest that such games were played with Americans as well as with outsiders. This may be a fiction, but it’s a sinister thought.

Boasting more smarts, slickness, subtlety and character than all of this summer's action offerings combined, “The Bourne Ultimatum” (like its predecessors) is an anomaly in today's multiplex world. (The whole series has the “old-school” feel of John Frankenheimer's work around 1972 -- which is a good thing.) The flick builds on the foundation of its excellent predecessors and then ups the ante at every turn. “Ultimatum” may be the best of the lot. Probably the best Hollywood movie of the whole year. Greengrass has crafted a template for all future spy films and moved into the penthouse of top directors. If this is indeed the finale to the series, as Damon has suggested, the filmmakers have gotten out while the getting’s good.