‘Ultimatum’ is ‘Bourne’ to thrill

John Hartl Film critic

Thanks primarily to the memory-challenged spy, Jason Bourne, Matt Damon got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last month.

Although Damon played the title roles in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Saving Private Ryan,” and he won an Oscar for co-writing “Good Will Hunting,” it’s an espionage-movie franchise that seems destined to become his ticket to lasting fame.

Damon thinks Bourne is the opposite of James Bond, who “kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it” (as the actor pointed out in a recent interview), but Bourne has become his Bond role. He can’t shake it any more than Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan can separate their careers from 007.

Quick facts Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Paddy Considine Director: Paul Greengrass Run time: 1 hour, 50 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13

Something about Damon’s tight-lipped stoicism fits this amnesiac character. Handicapped by the inability to remember who he is or what kind of danger he’s courting, Bourne spends much of his time trying to reassemble his identity from clues and patterns and vaguely recalled events that he hopes will reveal enough to dodge disaster.

The actor has played assassins before, but Mr. Ripley was never this edgy or vulnerable. Neither were Damon’s CIA agent in “The Good Shepherd” nor his police-department mole in last year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “The Departed.” Missing important parts of his memory, Bourne is almost always aware that he can’t see the whole picture, and that makes him a natural for gaining audience sympathy.

Damon’s third Bourne movie, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” may be the one “threequel” that adults have been waiting for this summer. It’s an undeniably exciting thriller, even if excitement sometimes seems to be all it has to offer.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, who was Oscar-nominated earlier this year for his 9/11 classic, “United 93,” it picks up where the last installment, “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004) left off, with Bourne matching wits with a tough CIA administrator (Joan Allen) who wants to “bring him in” — whatever that might mean at the moment.

New to the cast are David Strathairn and Scott Glenn as trigger-happy CIA officials, Paddy Considine as a British journalist, and Albert Finney as a mystery man who claims to have been “there at the beginning.” Allen’s character has shifted — originally suspicious of Bourne, she now wants to keep him alive — but Strathairn and Glenn are determined to terminate him.

When these pigheaded power-mongers say things like “Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” you know they’re really hoping for the worst, just so they can run amok and demonstrate their contempt for legal procedure. “Saving American lives” becomes a mantra-like justification for all sorts of mayhem. “It ends when we’ve won,” says Strathairn, summing up his character’s one-note treachery.

NBC News video Julia Stiles Aug. 1: Stiles tells TODAY host Matt Lauer about her character’s connection to Bourne, filming in Morocco and if there could be a fourth film. Today Show Entertainment

The script by Tony Gilroy, who worked on the previous “Bourne” movies, once more makes links with current events. In the “Bourne” view, the CIA is run by backstabbing incompetents and murderers, although a few good apples try to undermine their bad decisions.

Greengrass, who also directed “Supremacy,” seems less interested in exploring the characters than he is in creating a series of spectacular action sequences. There’s an especially furious, well-staged fight between Bourne and a hitman who’s been sent after him and another CIA employee (Julia Stiles), and the movie opens with a chase sequence that starts the adrenaline pumping.

Although Greengrass is a master at using a mobile camera and elliptical editing to create a sense of urgency, he overdoes the use of music to heighten tension. He also doesn’t ask Strathairn or Glenn to provide anything beyond standard-issue villainy; he wastes Considine in a role anyone could have played.

Doug Liman, who directed Damon’s first Bourne movie, “The Bourne Identity” (2002), seemed more concerned about relationships, though that may be due partly to the character-driven nature of the first installment in the series, which was built around the growing trust between Bourne and his lover, Marie (Franka Potente).

She was killed off in “Supremacy,” leaving Bourne (in Damon’s words) to wander through the rest of the series as “a serial monogamist who’s in love with his dead girlfriend and can’t stop thinking about her.”

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