The Bourne Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum

The tale of a spy who can’t remember. Jason Bourne is on a quest to find out who he really is and how he became a cold-blooded assassin. This is the third and supposedly final installment of the Bourne saga, and it is the grittiest yet. The thrill of the chase dominates the movie, as highlighted by an adrenaline-pumping, heart-stopping dash across the rooftops of Tangiers. Indeed, this movie uses a sized-down globe effectively as its setting, as Bourne hops from continent to continent, oblivious of post-911 counter-terror restrictions. Bourne is played as a super-hero (actually more of a super-anti-hero), able to jump borders with a single unobstructed leap, a sort of Jack Bauer on steroids. His dark side trails him like a ex-lover bent on revenge, showing its face in the form of flashbacks that surface at inconvenient plot points, ratcheting up the suspense factor whenever Bourne has a moment to spare.

Bourne’s identity search is complicated by his former employer’s wish to eliminate all evidence of his existence. A super-secret division of the CIA had been formed with the mandate to wage the ‘war on terror’. And the head of this division is portrayed with the stereotypical ruthlessness of amoral evil. The message is that America needed the freedom to kill purported terrorists, to bypass the overly bureaucratic rule of law, in order to save ‘American lives.’ Of course, this power is ultimately corruptive - the CIA head practically froths at the mouth in his lust to kill and cover up the mess they’ve created. Bourne is the living symbol of the underlying fallacy, the need to create a pre-programmed killing machine to save the concept of freedom.

The Bourne novels were written in the 1980's by Robert Ludlum. The screenwriters have clearly updated its themes to modern-day concerns, such as the virtually omniscient surveillance capabilities provided by London’s ubiquitous close-circuit cameras. Cleverly, the CIA is able to monitor, and even control, these video-feeds live and in colour, no doubt contributing to the paranoia of the tinfoil-hat crowd. Matt Damon is appropriately buff and stoic as the amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne, while David Strathairn plays up the bloodthirsty CIA Director Noah Vosen. Julia Stiles does another turn as the damsel in distress, albeit with a surprising lack of dialogue as she repeatedly stares wide-eyed while Jason plots and kills with equal ease.

The film delivers on what it promised, a suspenseful thrill ride through the secret world of anti-terrorist spies and assassins. It is short on plot and character development, instead filling the screen with non-stop action. It makes the most of its exotic locales, while its hand-held camera style alternately annoys with excessive shaking and thrills by putting the audience directly into scenes of speeding vehicles and crashing fists.