Philadelphia Weekly

Arriving at the tail end of a disastrous summer slate chock-full of bloated franchise flicks, The Bourne Ultimatum can't help but feel like an antidote to all the CGI poison we've been injecting into our eyeballs since May.

This trim, efficient, preposterously entertaining popcorn picture isn't just a model of craftsmanship, it's also a rousing rebuke to the idiotically widespread notion that turning off your brain is a requirement for enjoying an action movie. This is whip-smart genre filmmaking with a seething political undercurrent keyed directly into the here and now. Who says blockbusters can't be art?

We first met Matt Damon's amnesiac assassin in Doug Liman's surprise 2002 hit The Bourne Identity. Rediscovering his almost superhuman skill sets while on the run through Europe with Franka Potente's innocent Marie, the first Jason Bourne adventure put a nifty postmillennial spin on Robert Ludlum's Cold War spy series, complete with a low-key romance that made this endlessly watchable diversion feel like Before Sunrise for boys.

United 93 director Paul Greengrass took the reins with 2004's The Bourne Supremacy, and it was only a few moments into the picture that sweet Marie took a bullet in the head. That rare breed of sequel that deepens and expands upon the original film, Supremacy sent Damon on a darker, more isolated journey, face to face with the killer inside him, attempting to atone for the sins of his past.

Greengrass is back for The Bourne Ultimatum, a large chunk of which takes place in between Supremacy's despairing Moscow climax and that feel-good studio-mandated N.Y.C. epilogue that never felt quite right. Having lost the one person he cared about, and still tormented by memories of murder, Jason's heading home to confront the men who made him what he is.

Meanwhile things aren't going very well in Langley. Joan Allen's savvy CIA operative Pamela Landy, who in the last picture found herself shifting from Bourne's adversary to his ally, has just been sidelined by David Strathairn's take-no-prisoners, starched-shirt armchair warrior.

In case you haven't been reading the papers, we're in a whole new era of national security, free from any pesky oversight. Turns out the Treadstone Project that turned Jason Bourne into a Frankenstein monster was just the tip of the iceberg, and a hapless Guardian reporter (Paddy Considine) is dumping far too much classified information into the headlines for folks like Strathairn to sleep well at night.

The majority of The Bourne Ultimatum is a relentless cat-and-mouse game, as Bourne follows a bread-crumb trail of clues across the globe, pursued every step of the way by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of "take-down teams" and "activated assets with standing kill orders." The thrill lies in watching Jason strategize and outwit his would-be captors, improvising his way out of impossible situations with a Boy Scout's resourcefulness and those lightning-fast moves.

Shooting almost exclusively with handheld cameras, Greengrass keeps us crunched in tighter and closer up than most directors might dare. In Supremacy this technique occasionally tipped toward incoherence, but this time he and cinematographer Oliver Wood have found a happy medium, never sacrificing clarity for visceral impact. Stunt coordinator and second-unit director Dan Bradley again finds astounding ways to place the camera inside crashing cars at breakneck speeds, culminating in a Manhattan traffic pile-up that exceeds even the high standards set by the previous pictures.

The Bourne Ultimatum is as propulsive and nerve-jangling as any action flick I've seen, breathlessly rocketing from one hair-raising set piece to another, buttressed by elliptical, no-nonsense character beats that speak volumes in brief silences. (At a lean, mean 111 minutes, it's something like a half-hour shorter than every other summer event flick this year.)

But what I find most interesting is the moral severity Greengrass has imposed on the series. The killings in these films hurt, and carry with them a tremendous psychological cost. Damon, as always, underplays the part brilliantly, with barely a page or two worth of dialogue, conveying the character's torment strictly through his sleek physicality and haunted stare. The Bourne Ultimatum's final reel, with its stark allusions to hoodings and waterboarding, springs from a genuine place of outrage--at the patriotism of young men being perverted and used for nefarious purposes by an untrustworthy government. A disenchanted Allen surveys the agency's transgressions and sighs: "This isn't what we signed on for."

Looking back, it's often through entertainment that we can see the anxieties of an era peeking through the popcorn crowd-pleasers. The Bourne Ultimatum isn't just the best movie of this trilogy--it's one of the best films of the year.

The Bourne Ultimatum
A
Director: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn
Opens Fri., Aug. 3