Bourne Ultimatum
What is in essence a two hour chase scene, this third entry in the franchise hits the ground running with Bourne being pursued by Russian cops and never lets up. By the time the CIA gets a lock on an unlucky reporter and leads them to Bourne so they can start tracking him the film just moves at a breakneck pace, with some cool fight scenes thrown in for good measure. What Greengrass does to perfection here is show the wanton emptiness of these assassins: Their whole lives consist of sitting around their hotel room waiting for their phone to ring so that they may do their “duty”. It also helps that most of the “assets” are basically anonymous ciphers: none of them get any real buildup like Clive Owen’s laughably overblown Professor in the first film and the fact that they are just ordinary faces in the street adds to their effectiveness. As a whole, the film learns from the mistakes of the first two entries: there’s no bloated love story like what dragged down the first one as well as no overdose of plot exposition that hurt the second one as well. The streamlined nature enables the viewer to stay on the edge of their seat. The only fault is the overuse of the handheld “shakycam”: it works fine during the action scenes and brings a sense of reality, but when used during the more subdued dialogue scenes, it becomes distracting and overly draws attention to itself. The cast again does solid work, with the trio of old pros Straithairn, Glenn, and Finney as the government bad guys a lot of fun to watch; Damon continues to possess the quiet intensity which enabled him to carry the earlier entries; Joan Allen is just about the hottest piece of CIA brass you could still imagine; and Julia Stiles continues to stake her claim as to having perhaps the single prettiest face in cinema today, as here her Nicky reveals the truth about her and Bourne’s past. In the end, easily the best of the series, and an exception to the rule that the third film in a trilogy is always a clunker…
9/10