The Bourne Ultimatum is zero-G, next-gen, molecule-jangling filmmaking.
Go ahead and ascribe an adjective -- breathtaking, heart-stopping, head-spinning -- the fact is no stream-of-consciousness thesaurusizing (pulse-pounding, nerve-rattling, spellbinding) does justice to the experience of this fastest, fiercest Bourne yet.
Films unspool.
This downloads.
The best action movie of the summer? Try of a generation.
Director Paul Greengrass hasn't manufactured a sequel -- he's written code for a template all future Bonds, Ryans and whoever-the-hell-else will have to match or stumble and die trying.
Think Ultimatum, based loosely on Robert Ludlum's novel, sounds like every other part 2, 3 or 4 -- amping bloodshed and bullets to shake awake de-sensitized multiplexers? You're missing the point.
Greengrass' threequel, rocket-fuelled by a never-better Matt Damon, fires brain cells in both hemispheres. There's not a wasted iota here -- no clunk-clunk of exposition, no breather just because. Halfway through, I felt my feet lift off the floor.
The plot goes something like this: London journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) has stumbled onto a hyper-secret CIA black op code named Blackbriar.
It's so sensitive the whisper of it on Ross' cellphone sends sinister surveillance technology abuzz an ocean away in midtown Manhattan.
There, the Blackbriar leak may as well be a blot of blood in shark-infested waters, sparking the attention and ire of a Bush-league spook (David Strathairn) and Pam Landry (Joan Allen), the honourable but tough-as-nails CIA bureaucrat from 2004's Supremacy who, in the last moments of that film, told Bourne his birth name.
Thing is, that still hasn't happened yet -- Ultimatum actually kicks off in Moscow following Bourne's confession to a young Russian girl whose parents he murdered. Still racked by flashbacks to his vicious past -- more replete with post-9/11 imagery than ever before -- Bourne's search for his identity leads him to Ross and, consequently, to Strathairn's thinly-veiled Republican stooge.
From here, Greengrass piggybacks jaw-dropping set piece upon jaw-dropping set piece. When the ever-resourceful Bourne sets up a meet with Ross at London's Waterloo Station, he puppeteers the reporter through corridors and crowds to evade a rapidly-constricting network of operatives and video surveillance cameras linked via satellite to Strathairn's hi-tech hub.
Yet the man unerringly pulling all the strings here is Greengrass, whose faculty for electrifying -- yet never disorienting -- chases and clashes is staggering.
A mind-blowing mid-point chase over the rooftops of Tangier, for example, demolishes both precedent and expectation.
Yet throughout, the director of United 93 never loses his focus, or the emotionalism hard-wired into Bourne's search for both self and redemption.
By the time he locates his objective -- found amid the skyscrapers of New York -- we're as invested in finding the truth as he is.
And doubtlessly just as exhausted.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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