DVD REVIEW: "The Bourne Ultimatum"

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

It seems this whole Bourne business is a lot more complicated, a lot more sinister than we thought.

For those of you just emerging from 10 years of isolation in an Afghan cave, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is a CIA operative/assassin, marked for death and suffering from amnesia, which is horrible because he obviously has no knowledge of why anyone would want him dead. In the first movie, the aptly named "The Bourne Identity," he discovered just that--his identity. In the second, "The Bourne Supremacy," he does rule supreme by learning who was responsible for him becoming the killing machine he is and why these folks want to knock him off. But most of all he strikes back at those who killed his girlfriend.

At the beginning of "The Bourne Ultimatum" (after he escapes from Moscow where he went in the final scenes of "Supremacy" to apologize to the orphaned daughter of the Russian politician Bourne murdered on his first assignment) he reads an article in the London Guardian written by its "security correspondent" Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) that suggests that Treadstone, the CIA program that created him, was simply one part of a much larger CIA operation known as Blackbriar. This is an organization that has carte blanche to kill anyone it deems a bad guy, even if they are Americans. (It's no coincidence that all this sounds a lot like our own "War on Terror.") At the same time, Bourne begins having flashbacks that suggest he needs to look into this a little bit more deeply.

This takes him to London and the first of this film's three truly breathtaking set pieces, this one set in London's Waterloo Station, where Bourne tries to meet Ross. Without the use of any special effects, director Paul Greengrass creates a scene of not only unbearable tension, but also amazing clarity as he shows all the tools the government has at its disposal--the video screens, the hidden microphones, tracking devices, instantaneous phone tapping and tracing, schematics--and how one man programmed to elude all those devices can do just that.

What Bourne learns from Ross is that Neal Daniels (Colin Stintin) one of the persons who was involved very early in Bourne's indoctrination (should I say "brainwashing") is now the head of this black-ops operation's European office, located in Madrid. This knowledge takes Bourne to the Spanish capital, only to learn that Daniels had escaped hours earlier after learning Bourne was on to him. But the trip to Spain does reunite Bourne with one of Daniels' co-workers, Nicky Parsons (the much underrated Julia Stiles) who still carries a crush for Bourne (But then what girl wouldn't?) from meeting him in Berlin in the first film.

Together Nicky and Bourne follow Daniels to Morocco where the second and the best of the three set-pieces takes place. By now Blackbriar's leader, Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) and its conscience, Pamela Lundy (Joan Allen), are following every move Bourne makes. Vosen has hired an assassin (the CIA calls them "assets"), Desh Bouksani (Joey Ansah) to take out Daniels and then double back to kill Nicky and Bourne. Desh spots Nicky trying to evade him through the sinisterly narrow streets of Tangier just as Bourne, from the rooftop of a building, spots Desh going after Nicky. Greengrass choreographs this three-way chase with a sure hand and tops it off with a claustrophobic hand-to-hand combat scene shot in such an exhilarating fashion that it places the viewer right in the middle of the action. This is as good a fight scene as you will ever see in a motion picture.

An address found among charred documents in Daniels' possession finally leads Bourne to New York, to home plate and the third great set-piece, in which this entire CIA goes to a spot where it knows it will capture Bourne while Bourne is back at their offices rifling through incriminating documents.

If this description makes the movie sound like nothing more than brilliantly conceived action sequences interrupted ever so briefly by a few words of conversation, than, dear readers, I have served you well because that's exactly what it is. But it also a film with intelligence, a film not afraid to give its hero a plausible moral compass, nor afraid to say that the programming ideas conceived in the original "The Manchurian Candidate" can be made relevant today. It also has something to say about the direction and the sensibility of our present administration. In one scene Pamela Lundy asks Vosen "When is all this going to stop?" He replies coldly, "When we've won."

It is interesting to compare this film to Greengrass' effort from last year, "United 93." The two have a more in common than you might think at first glance. "United 93" reflects the knowledge of those on the ground against the emerging knowledge of those in the plane. In "Supremacy," Greengrass pits the knowledge of those in CIA headquarters against the emerging knowledge of Jason Bourne. And he does it in a way that ranks him among the best new directors of the last 20 years. He creates a signature style without waving it in your face like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan are wont to do.

In a year when it seems I have seen more than my share of third installments of movies, none of which have had anything to really recommend them, what a surprise to see a superbly crafted, fast-moving film molded from what could have been regarded as a worn out genre, the spy thriller. "The Bourne Ultimatum" is not only the best of the Bourne series, it is one of the best films of the year.

Grade: A