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The Bourne Ultimatum
dir. Paul Greengrass
The Bourne Ultimatum continues to refine the stripped-down, built-for-speed approach of its predecessors. For two solid hours, it moves relentlessly, intelligently forward, as everything extraneous gets chucked over the side.
Picking up more or less immediately after 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, the continent-hopping story finds amnesiac man of action Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) continuing to stomp his way down Recovered Memory Lane, this time squaring off against evil Black Ops section chief David Strathairn. Narratively speaking, this is by far the least twisty of the series, which isn’t a bad thing at all, as it allows the filmmakers to devote their attention to generating sheer kinetic force. Returning director Paul Greengrass has scaled back a bit on the blinding editing pace of Supremacy (you can now actually sort of subliminally tell who’s punching whom) while somehow jacking up its nervy, handheld immediacy. Even during its rare moments of downtime, the picture thrums with an unbelievable amount of energy.
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“Unbelievable” may be selling the movie’s accomplishments short, actually: Where most modern action flicks settle for a bombastic handful of CGI money shots, here there are at least three sustained sequences that come off as instant classics of the form. (An early set piece in Waterloo Station is a by-god masterpiece of seamlessly juggling different perspectives.) It’s difficult, really, to talk much more about the infernal old-school rush of this thing without devolving into drooling critical gush, so suffice it to say that this is the rare action film that wears you out without leaving you feeling ill-used. If this is indeed the finale to the series, as Damon has suggested, they’ve gotten out while the getting’s pretty goddamn good.
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