Starring: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Paddy Considine and Brian Cox
Director: Paul Greengrass
It’s a tradition, seemingly, that by the time a franchise hits the third instalment it’s started to lose some fire. This year alone has seen the deeply perfunctory origin of Venom in Spiderman 3, a third Pirates of the Caribbean rumoured to have been written as it was being filmed and a third Shrekthat whilst fun lacked the surprising emotional punch that even the second movie achieved.
It’s a tremendous relief then to find that the third Jason Bourne movie is as restless, as driven as it’s co-star, constantly pushing itself to new heights. From the acting down to the startling and frequently audacious structure, this is a third movie that refuses to rest on its laurels. Contractually obliged threequels take note.
Picking up seconds after the closing Moscow sequence of its predecessor, Ultimatum brings Bourne full circle. Someone has broken cover about him, gone to the press and Bourne wants to know who. At the same time, Vose (Strathairn) the CIA agent heading up Blackbriar, the project that succeeded Treadstone, is convinced he knows who the leak is; Jason Bourne.
Straight away, this sort of complex plotting is what sets the movie apart. Here, characters, including Bourne, take action based on bad information, not because they’re stupid but because that’s all they know. This is a complex, constantly shifting world of grey areas and divided loyalties and no one is ever entirely sure who is working for who or why. The end result is a film which manages to constantly pull the rug out from under you without ever once resorting to cheap tricks, bringing Bourne’s story to a definitive end whilst at the same time neatly and at times even elegantly, echoing the original film. From a conversation in a road-side café to one of Bourne’s final lines in the film, there are constant reminders of what this man has done, what he’s been made into and the journey he’s taken. The end result is a film which is as much a character study as it is an action movie with some fantastic and hugely ambitious narrative touches. The best example of this comes when one entire scene from one of the previous films is revisited in its entirety and given a new spin that helps both films immeasurably.
And front and centre in all of that is Damon. He’s an actor who is regularly pilloried for his lack of depth but based on his two turns this year, in this and Ocean’s Thirteen I’m mystified as to why. Damon has a natural authority that his willingness to use silence only accentuates. His best scene here is nothing but him rubbing his hands in mid shot as Nikki (Stiles) gets changed. It takes a full thirty seconds for you to realise he’s trying to rub the blood off his hands.
He’s in fine company too, with Allen and Strathairn carrying a full hour of the film as CIA agents with competing agendas. Both are that unique cadre of actor who simply don’t know how to turn in bad work and they’re required to do a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting here, their rapid fire deductions far more of a threat to Bourne than the men on the ground. However, the real standout here is Stiles, a bit player in the previous two movies who comes into her own here with stunning results. She delivers a single line to Bourne at one point that carries so much emotional weight, so much implication and yet is so ambiguous that it supports two entirely different and equally valid readings of the relationship between the two characters. This is needlepoint acting, conveying emotion with subtlety and posture and caution and Stiles, who has been trapped for years in sub-standard rom-coms, is more than capable of this.
There’s the same bone-crunching action here as the previous two, including a staggeringly ambitious rooftop chase/fight scene that runs almost twenty minutes and is almost unbearably tense by the closing moments. There’s also a neat, subtle reprise of the brutal car chase from the second film and some nice moments of ‘Bourne Fu’ as he eliminates opponents with the minimum possible effort but ultimately, that’s just icing on the cake. This is a supremely intelligent, unusual, innovative action movie that tells a complete story in itself and tops off a high quality trilogy with a high quality final chapter. Simply put, it’s not just a hell of a film but a hell of an achievement. Go see it.
Alasdair started writing when he was nine, powered by a hefty diet of '80s cartoons, Doctor Who and Icepops. He's quite tired by this stage but has written a lot of things for a lot of people, including Fortean Times, Neo and Surreal.