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The Bourne Ultimatum
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: August 5, 2007

When Matt Damon was hired to play a rogue CIA assassin in the 2002 spy thriller The Bourne Identity, even Matt himself might have second-guessed the decision. One Jason Bourne trilogy later, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else getting the character right. This series has defied convention and expectation from day one, and over the course of three films has managed to whip itself into a kick-ass masterpiece. How did the filmmakers know it would work—to ratchet up the fun by abandoning all silliness; to cobble cat-and-mouse set pieces out of countless split-second hand-held video clips; and to pit the cerebral, baby-faced Damon against a succession of trained killers, a labyrinth of government corruption, and wave after wave of hapless local cops? Who cares how they knew? That’s the mystery of creative thinking. One man’s taboo notion is another man’s genre-redefining piece of cinematic history.

Certainly hiring a real actor to play Jason Bourne was the best and bravest decision these honchos made. Fifteen years ago, the role might have gone to Tom Cruise, who would have delivered one of his admirable feats of trying. Meanwhile, as Tom Cruise has slowly destabilized over the last few years, Matt Damon has slowly become a master of understated acting. Last year he gave nothing away as a morally bankrupt CIA mastermind in The Good Shepherd, and then, a few months later, he internalized a heart attack’s worth of anxiety as a jitter-free mob informant in The Departed. It was a banner year for Matt, and yet as great as he was in those movies, the Jason Bourne character may be his greatest accomplishment of all.

One can be sure that physical acting like this is hard to do convincingly. That’s why “killing-machine” roles often go to the likes of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme, martial arts professionals who can deliver a lot of authentic vigilante justice, but can’t convincingly pour of bowl of cereal if there’s a camera rolling. Not so long ago, if your priority as a filmmaker was hand-to-hand combat sequences, you would have had to forego the likes of Richard Dreyfuss and his acting chops, and hire a charisma-free karate expert… or maybe split the difference and settle for Tom Cruise.

After seeing The Bourne Ultimatum, though, I’m fairly convinced Matt Damon could mop the floor with both Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme, then pour himself a bowl of cereal, then knock Tom Cruise and his whole crazy shtick off of Oprah’s couch, and then share a witty tête-à-tête with Richard Dreyfuss on the subject of Mr. Holland’s Opus. Damon’s Jason Bourne is a physical marvel, a coiled spring, alive primarily through his instincts for combat and his talent for avoiding and manipulating surveillance. He’s also a believable human being—a decent guy, vaguely regretful of a past he can’t remember, and rightfully pissed-off that his bosses keep trying to kill him. He doesn’t know who he is, but he knows what he can do, and that existential adventure/conundrum, as embodied by the entirely convincing Damon, makes the whole trilogy compelling to watch. It’s great acting.

That said, when Jason Bourne slams a car into reverse and drives it off a parking garage roof, he probably deprives Matt Damon, once again, of a deserved Oscar nomination. Just ask Uma Thurman. When it comes time to hand out awards, Hollywood seems to hold it against an actor for being more than just a disembodied, emoting head.

The Bourne Ultimatum is a near perfect conclusion to this Jason Bourne saga, and that is gratifying news indeed. Prior to this weekend, a case could have been made that The Lord of the Rings is the only consistently excellent trilogy in film history. But the Bourne series is not just consistently excellent, it actually seems to take a single headlong narrative and consistently escalate it in intensity over the course of three films. The whole series is like a centrifuge that by the third film has viewers crushed by G-forces against their seats.

Enormous credit is due to the film’s director, Paul Greengrass, who not only dispenses with filters and tracking shots but appears to have filmed the whole thing on his camera phone… or spliced it together from a hundred camera phones. One of the brilliancies of this picture is the way the prolonged, unbearably suspenseful action scenes are edited together as if from numerous eyewitness accounts, each shot caught from a different angle, lasting about a second, and capturing a new detail. One can almost hear the bystanders being interviewed afterward. “He was wearing a trench coat.” “I saw him put something in this guy’s pocket.” It all comes together as a whirling, no-nonsense, hyper-realistic narrative. The technique is both innovative and compelling, and probably about as easy to master as chess—which surely won’t discourage a parade of clumsy imitators from trying it. Folks, go see The Bourne Ultimatum now, before watered-down substitutes start popping up everywhere. I suppose we should all brace ourselves for CSI Tangiers.

Potent as all the violence is, it’s once again a moment of drama that elevates this story above mere whiz-bang awesomeness. Jason Bourne, after all, is not merely trying to remember his past, he wants to atone for it as well. His mercies and good karma finally tilt heavily in his favor by story’s end, and the film’s last shot beautifully and poetically depicts one last re-birth for this character. With his enemies vanquished, we can assume the world will at last leave Jason alone. But we also know that his survival this time is a well-deserved blessing. A torment-free identity awaits Jason Bourne, probably the only thing, in all three films, that he didn’t see coming a mile away.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld