Bourne Ultimatum, The (2007)

3 out of 4

Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Julia Stiles, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney

Director: Paul Greengrass

Time: 111 mins

Viewed: Regal Marlboro 8, New Jersey

Another in the long line of summer 2007 threequels (there's one more with Rush Hour 3 coming out next week) has the audience rejoin amnesiac spy/assassin Jason Bourne (Damon) on his quest to discover his past, leading him all over Europe, Morocco, and finally back to New York. Nefarious conspirators (Strathairn and Glenn) thwart him at almost every turn, while former roadblocks (Allen and Stiles) provide sympathetic aid. Directed by Greengrass the same way he did The Bourne Supremacy, with a shaky, dizzying but breathless intensity, the action starts uncertainly but peaks with a scintillating sequence in Tangier that combines a motorcycle chase, a frenzied rooftop jumpfest and a bonecrunching, one-on-one fistfight that recalls the Sean Connery/Robert Shaw duel in From Russia With Love. Indeed, while there's nothing much that's new here, with a plot that seems culled from the first two in the series, the "realness" (if there is such a word) of the action is what keeps this film pulsing and alive. Damon is again compelling as the determined killing machine who realizes his job is not what it's cracked up to be, and it's nice to see Allen and Stiles in assist mode this time. An ingenious coup is the use of the previous film's epilogue as this film's spark for the New York segment, which happens about 2/3rds of the way in.

(c) Joe Wong (5 August 2007)