Movies

Bourne Again

A spy trilogy culminates in a thrilling Ultimatum.

By NATHAN LEE 

The Bourne Ultimatum opens in Russia with the amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) doing what he does best: eluding capture, cracking skulls and brooding. Lickety-split, he's en route to Paris, nursing his wounds and breaking out with a bad case of the itchy-scratchy hallucinations that come with Hollywood Flashback Syndrome. Choice and painful bits from The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy whiz through his mind's eye, but before you can mutter not another threequel, the movie goes into full-blown techno-thriller frenzy, scattering hyper-compressed plot points from Moscow to Paris to London and New York.

So much for the first 10 minutes.

Here's what's up: Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), "security correspondent" for The London Guardian, has been tipped in Turin about a black-op CIA umbrella program code-named Blackbriar, the mere mention of which on a cell phone flags some terrifyingly competent post-Patriot Act software. Enter a shady, warmongering CIA bigwig (David Strathairn) and a sweet, nonviolent one (Joan Allen), plus various spooks (Scott Glenn, Albert Finney). Bourne gets caught in the middle when his blip shows up on the grid in pursuit of Ross, whose 411 on Blackbriar may finally explain why he kicks so much ass.

Adapted from Robert Ludlum's novel by a trio of writers who never met a cloak-and-dagger chestnut they didn't swallow whole, the story of Bourne's quest for his origin is often as formulaic as a dry martini — shaken not stirred. But whereas Bond movies are juiced by a conflict of egos, the Bourne adventures are all about competing intelligence systems, as manifested through action set pieces. In the case of Ultimatum, make that flabbergasting, mind-boggling, next-level action set pieces.

This is director Paul Greengrass' second Bourne picture, but it's also a stealth sequel to his last film, United 93. Both are up to the same basic business: generating tension through the interface of two meticulously paced, discretely parceled, highly pressurized sets of information. United 93 unfolds in the unbearable gap between the knowledge of the passengers and the facts on the ground — a distance rendered even more agonizing by our awareness of how it all turns out.

Ultimatum is structured around three gargantuan cat-and-mouse pursuits, each of which pits the extensive, high-tech eyes and ears of the CIA against the mobile, intuitive, ultra-alert mind of a single (super) man. The excitement of these sequences has less to do with stunts (first-rate) or spectacle (best car chase ever) than with the tango between these two intelligences and the ways in which the spectator is invited to the dance.

In an astonishing Waterloo Station sequence, as Bourne attempts to make contact with and protect the journalist Ross, Greengrass establishes the CIA surveillance network in tremendous detail — video monitors, field agents, secret microphones, digital schematics — then supercharges the suspense through Bourne's detection and circumvention. Bravura doesn't begin to describe Greengrass' skill. This is, simply put, some of the most accomplished filmmaking being done anywhere for any purpose.

Greengrass' Bourne Supremacy was one of the few movies to justify a spasmodic handheld aesthetic by keying the action to its controlling consciousness (a freaked-out amnesiac) and placing us into an equivalent state of mind as we struggled to steady the flow of visual information just as Bourne struggled to make sense of his circumstances. Ultimatum refines this participatory dynamic even further.

I much prefer such virtuosity in the service of unencumbered entertainment to the, uh ... what was the point of United 93 again? Not that Ultimatum lacks an agenda; it's actually the more overtly political of the two movies. Bourne is the action hero as blowback — black sheep of the black-op set, figured in terms of post-9/11 protocols. His early deprogramming is repeatedly linked to the contemporary iconography of humiliation (black hoods) and torture (waterboarding). Strathairn's CIA agent defends his methods as necessary until "we've won," appropriating the counterintuitive rhetoric of the "war on terror."

But Ultimatum doesn't pretend to be anything other than make-believe. As a political statement, United 93 was defended as a critique of government failure — a rebuttal to the flawless anti-terror tactics of 24 — but you could claim the same for any number of military yahoo movies. What's troubling is its pretense to objectivity, the claim to being as close as possible to an authoritative (even authorized!) re-creation. United 93 and The Passion of the Christ are basically the same movie for different audiences.

Ultimatum doesn't have that cross to bear. It's responsible only to the code of the blockbuster. Concentrating on an effective dramatic resolution may explain why the political conclusion is delivered with such unexpected force — the allegory is unforced. The entire Bourne trilogy has been a maze of intrigue and double-cross winding to a final face-off with the minotaur: the beast that made Bourne who he is. What (and whom) Ultimatum ultimately confronts flips the standard conspiracy thriller on its head. Greengrass gets there so deftly, it's enough to make yours spin.