THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM

Roger Ebert wrote in a recent review of the tendency of modern action films to substitute visual chaos for visual elegance. The Bourne Ultimatum, perched as it is on the edge of a tech-modern, jagged, capricious new film aesthetic, embodies the strengths and visually numbing weaknesses of this style. Unarguably lean, mean, and propulsive, the film is driven by Paul Greengrass' docu-verite style, previously applied to fact-based cinema verite landmarks Bloody Sunday and United 93 to great effect, and here alternating between exciting, tough immediacy and nausea-inducing visual overkill.

The film is all visual chaos, with Greengrass' jerky, mobile cameras, grainy look, and whiplash-fast editing, which works beautifully to cover the absurdities of the story with a patina of plausibility. The holes do manage to peek through in some of the few slower patches, high-ranking CIA operatives conveniently lacking blinds on their office windows which fortunately face a building with an empty room that allows Bourne to watch them file secret documents away being one example, but most of the time the film drowns the viewer in sound and fury and image and yanks them along by the lapels to the next exotic locale in its violent, grimy travelogue.

Greengrass does deliver a couple of enthralling set-pieces, a long chase sequence in Tangiers is perhaps the highlight, though the fight sequence that climaxes this sequence is easily one of the most confusingly shot hand-to-hand combat scenes ever filmed. I was reaching for a sadly-lacking bottle of dramamine after that one.

The Bourne Ultimatum captures the morally ambiguous zeitgeist through its portrayal of secret CIA operations that train killers, flaunt civil liberties and human rights, and think nothing of applying 'rendition protocols'. The villains lie rotting at the heart of the institutions that are supposed to secure us, with Bourne himself being a walking, seemingly indestructible example of blowback, a wetware Frankenstein returning to confront his makers, and learning to control the creature lurking inside him and construct the semblance of a normal soul.

Given the interesting subtexts of the political and the personal, Bourne himself is a surprisingly flat character, with little nuance, though this may be the fault of the screenplay and its inability to escape being yet another extended chase, rather than Matt Damon himself (but part of me can't stop thinking of Damon as being miscast, perhaps unfairly). It's left to some of the supporting cast to provide acting spark -- Albert Finney, Joan Allen, and David Straithairn are all riveting in their performances (Julia Stiles seems merely out of place).

With The Bourne Ultimatum the brilliant Paul Greengrass is struggling to perfect adapting his chaotic on-the-ground style to the Hollywood action film, with some mixed results. With a better story, and some opportunity to slow down and allow visual elegance, character, and performance to make their mark, Greengrass could deliver something approaching the brilliance of some of his earlier work. As it is the film, though uncommonly smart for an action picture, too often misses the mark.

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Directed by Paul Greengrass

Written by Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum

Starring:

Matt Damon...Jason Bourne

Julia Stiles...Nicky Parsons

David Strathairn...CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen

Scott Glenn...CIA Director Ezra Kramer

Paddy Considine...Simon Ross

Edgar Ramirez...Paz

Albert Finney...Dr. Albert Hirsch