After The Bourne Supremacy, any potential sequel would have to up its game. Paul Greengrass had pushed himself further through United 93, and Martin Campbell adopted the darkness and gritty style to re-launch James Bond with Casino Royale. The 'shaky camera' style of… More
After The Bourne Supremacy, any potential sequel would have to up its game. Paul Greengrass had pushed himself further through United 93, and Martin Campbell adopted the darkness and gritty style to re-launch James Bond with Casino Royale. The 'shaky camera' style of Supremacy had become widely imitated, though most who attempted to mimic Greengrass failed to marry the style to gripping drama. If a sequel were to happen, it had to redress this balance and better all that had gone before. Nothing else would do, and no-one else could do it.
Thankfully for us, The Bourne Ultimatum is brilliant. It is an extraordinary piece of work, and clearly the best instalment in the trilogy; it may even be Paul Greengrass' best film. Everything which made the previous two instalments so gripping is refined and reshaped into something new, and Greengrass pushes the action and drama to breaking point to create something is intense, intelligent and unforgettable.
Purely on a technical level, The Bourne Ultimatum is a perfect thriller. It is believable, exciting and all the pieces fit together beautifully. But most of all, it is fantastically tense, beginning where Supremacy left off and never letting up the pace until Bourne's final moments of reckoning. From the shootout in Waterloo Station to the car chase through New York City, the film is proof positive that you can hold in an audience in a state of nerve-jangling tension without resorting to explosions or incoherent techno-babble.
Despite being roughly the same length as Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum feels quicker, sharper and edgier. Greengrass' builds on his successful marriage of action and drama in Supremacy and broadens it out so he can recreate this seamless tension wherever the camera is placed. Even when you are watching the characters on CCTV, rather than being up close and in their face, you feel like you're right there in the room with them, completely part of the story. Even when the odd contrivance happens, like Bourne surviving the car bomb, the film gets away with it because we are so gripped by the general picture. The Tangier fight is terrific: every cut is perfect and the whole sequence leaves you breathless.
What really makes The Bourne Ultimatum great, though, is the precise way in which the stakes are raised. The presence of Blackbriar moves us away from a game of 'us' and 'them' (albeit one in which both 'us' and 'them' are fragmented and disparate). In both the previous films, our focus has been so rooted on Bourne (and rightly so) that the other CIA goings-on have not been examined in great depth. Now that Bourne is re-entering the web, we have to take time to examine that web, and so the film delves deeper into the extreme measures of the intelligence services.
Alongside the battle between Bourne and the CIA, there is a secondary fight between two schools of thought over the role and remit of the security services. "A republic lives on a knife's edge" says Albert Finney's Dr. Hirsch, and the two figures charged with safeguarding it are after Bourne for different reasons. On the one hand, we have Noah Vosen, an arch-Machiavellian who heads the Blackbriar operation. He praises the virtues of "no more red tape", being able to dispatch terrorist suspects in the instance he needs. He treats Bourne as a dangerous figure who knows too much, and must be eliminated to serve the greater good. On the other hand, we have Pamela Landy, who is equally tough and no-nonsense but has a clearer sense of morality. Her interest in Bourne has more to do with the nature of Blackbriar, and questioning whether both he and it have been manipulated.
Because Greengrass is so adept at recreating reality on screen, there are several moments in the film which are genuinely chilling. When Vosen orders the killing of Nicky Parsons, Landy disputes his decision. She yells, "You start down this path, where does it end?"; he replies coolly, "It ends when we've won." Vosen believes that his decisions are entirely justified on their own terms, reminding Landy not to "second-guess an operation from an armchair." The shoot-on-sight authorisation is especially eerie, considering the film was released in the UK just after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. At one point Matt Damon says: "This is real". With everything else in place, we believe him.
In structuring the plot around the treason of Neil Daniels, Greengrass subtly hints at his own political views. Where the intelligence services in Identity were completely uniform in their approach and beliefs, here they are populated with the likes of Landy and Daniels who are getting cold feet about everything happening around them. When Bourne and Landy finally meet, she remarks that "this is not what I signed up for". We also have the various agencies still competing against each other, whether in the Spanish police arresting the spies in Madrid or the shootout in the New York car park.
Amidst all this nail-biting tension and political substance, The Bourne Ultimatum also finds time to create a greater sense of cohesion within the trilogy. The film recognises the need to tie up all the loose ends in a way that Supremacy didn't need to, chiefly because Supremacy began two years after the events of Identity and therefore could essentially start afresh.
To this end, we have more flashbacks, which are more graphic and more painful for the central character. The jump cut at the end of Supremacy is incorporated into the final third, turning a crafty zinger into an incremental plot device. And Nicky Parsons cuts her hair like Marie Kreutz did in Identity. This is perhaps symbolic, since Bourne sends Parsons away rather than let her come with him. This is him atoning for Marie, ensuring he does not repeat his mistake and endanger someone he cares about.
The true genius of the film comes in the last 20 minutes, where Bourne finally discovers who he is and why all of this started. Greengrass knows that this is the one bit that cannot be rushed, because it is the crux of the story and it encapsulates everything the series has examined. He takes his time with Damon and Finney, showing how the ideal of "saving American lives" has been so brutally turned on its head. In committing himself to his country, Bourne has signed up to an organisation which allows US citizens to be targeted if the likes of Vosen deem it necessary. The republic has begun feeding on itself, and must be stopped before it is too late.
The performances in The Bourne Ultimatum are superb. Matt Damon goes from strength to strength, atoning in one fell swoop for both The Brothers Grimm and The Good Shepherd. David Straitharn has never been better, improving on his performance in Good Night and Good Luck to make Noah Vosen a force to be reckoned with. Joan Allen and Julia Stiles are both on great form, and it is good to see the latter becoming more than a peripheral character. And Paddy Considine makes good of his supporting role, proving that there is more to him than his work with Shane Meadows.
The Bourne Ultimatum is an extraordinary piece of work and the summation of one of a fantastic trilogy. Its fight sequences are brilliantly thrown together (no pun intended), its direction is superb, its acting is fantastic and it is positively dripping with substance. It is the perfect thinking-man's action film, with enough meat to chew on and enough mind-blowing spectacle to entertain. Most of all, it is a fabulous thrill-ride, in which every scene is cohesive and constantly thrilling. Bond, hang up your Rolex: this is the new gold standard.
