Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Paul Greengrass
Year: 2007
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
Let me start out by saying that I’m not a big fan of The Bourne Identity. In the first installment of the Bourne trilogy, Matt Damon just wasn’t convincing as super assassin Jason Bourne, even considering the amnesia angle. Whatever Doug Liman’s merits might be as a director (I really liked his offbeat thriller Go), they don’t extend to photographing martial arts sequences. The cheats he did to make Matt Damon look like a deadly martial artist were laughable.
On the other hand, director Paul Greengrass, who was best known for the docudrama Bloody Sunday pre-Bourne, proved to be a distinct improvement when he took over the series with The Bourne Supremacy. He managed to film Matt Damon’s martial arts sequences in such a way as to suspend our disbelief.
By the time of The Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass had the formula down cold. Most of the time, I’m not at all a fan of attention deficit disorder cutting, but Greengrass has made it an intergral part of his style. He seldom cuts just for the sake of mimicking MTV. He uses it as a way of communicating an incredible amount of information very quickly. Normally, photographing action sequences in fragments is the kiss of death, but Greengrass pulls it off. In his hands, the spatial relationships between the characters are always crystal clear, which is of tantamount important in action sequences.
And there are some doozies in The Bourne Ultimatum, the best of which is a race between an assassin (chillingly referred to as an “asset”) and Bourne to get to a human target, which is played with the precision of a chess match and the kineticism of a John Woo gun battle. (By the way, that is very high praise indeed.)
In another spectacular sequence, Bourne attempts to coach a reporter through evading surveillance from half a dozen agents and assassins in the Waterloo Railway Terminal by means of a prepaid cell phone he’s slipped into the reporter’s pocket.
These are only the most impressive set pieces, but the truth is that the Bourne Ultimatum is a non-stop adrenaline rush.
The best thing of all is that this frenetic action serves a narrative function and has morale consequences, which makes for a very rich thriller. For this, alot of the credit has to go to screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay.
The Bourne Ultimatum also features a number of wonderful characters including Albert Finney, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, and Joan Allen. I’ve also got to put in a word for the two main assassins stalking Bourne, who are absolutely chilling: Édgar Ramírez and Joey Ansah. Those guys are scary.
The film picks up immediately after the end of The Bourne Supremacy. Jason Bourne is continuing to retrace his steps, getting closer and closer to finding out who he actually was before the agency got their mitts on him.
Throughout the Bourne flicks, as in most modern spy movies, the government is depicted as having such advanced surveillance and analytical technology as to practically constitute omniscience. That’s good for The Bourne Ultimatum, as it gives superspy Jason Bourne a worthy adversary. All I can say is, given how evil our current government is, I thank God our intelligent agencies aren’t this competent.
In any case, The Bourne Ultimatum ends the series on a very high note indeed, raising the bar for spy thrillers in general.
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