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The Bourne Ultimatum Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for violence and intense sequences of action) Genre: Action Theater release: August 03, 2007 by Universal Directed by: Paul Greengrass Runtime: 1 hour 55 minutes Cast: Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), Julia Stiles (Nicky Parsons), Joan Allen (Pamela Landy), David Straitharn (Noah Vosen), Paddy Considine (Simon Ross), Albert Finney (Dr. Albert Hirsch), Scott Glenn (Ezra Kramer), Joey Ansah (Desh), Daniel Brühl (Martin Kreutz) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

In this high-tech digital age, the makers of high-profile action movies sometimes like to brag about how they used real cars and real stunts—even when some of the defining images in their films couldn't possibly exist without pixels on a screen. (Yes, Live Free or Die Hard, I'm pointing at you and that spinning airborne car that just happens to miss our hero by a hair.) But every now and then, along comes a film that really seems to have happened in front of the cameras—and The Bourne Ultimatum is just such a film.

The action scenes in this, the third and apparently final installment of the Bourne series, may have had a digital assist here or there, but if they did, you never notice. What you do notice is the constant action, the fights and chases, and the cars that seem to crash not just into each other but, at times, into the cameras themselves. If the pictures weren't staying in focus, there are times you'd swear the lens itself was contributing to the showers of shattered glass.

As before, the film concerns Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a former CIA assassin who lost his memory after a botched hit job. The first time we saw him, in The Bourne Identity, he was floating in the water, and the new film makes much of the role that water has played throughout this series, visually and symbolically, as an agent of forgetfulness but also of renewal, as an agent of death but also of life.

Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne

In the first film, Bourne emerged from the water with killer reflexes and no memory of his past, and his amnesia, combined with the humanizing friendship that developed between him and a German civilian named Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente), gave him the opportunity to put away the old man and become someone better, someone new—water as baptism. (The series has inspired no shortage of "Bourne again" puns.) In the sequels, however, Bourne begins to remember sins from his past for which he feels a need to atone—and here, the water that erased his memories brings to mind the River Lethe, a stream in Greek mythology that made those who drank from it forget their previous lives. The Greek word for "truth," aletheia, draws its name from this river and literally means "unforgetfulness"—and that's an apt term for the sort of truth that Bourne pursues in these sequels.

It is tempting to say The Bourne Ultimatum picks up where the previous film, The Bourne Supremacy, left off, but the truth is more complicated than that. Supremacy ended with an epilogue in New York that took place several weeks after the climax of the story proper in Moscow—and the first two-thirds of Ultimatum take place between that climax and that epilogue. This has the effect of casting the closing moments of Supremacy in a completely different light, and it just may be the most daring re-invention of a movie's final scene since Back to the Future Part II.

Nicky (Julia Stiles) can help Jason find some answers

Marie was killed in the previous film, so the new film begins with Bourne visiting her brother (Goodbye Lenin!'s Daniel Brühl), giving him the bad news, and promising him that he will track down the people who are ultimately responsible for her death. Coincidentally, a British reporter, Simon Ross (In America's Paddy Considine) has begun publishing articles on Bourne and the shadowy CIA branch for which he once worked, and these stories contain information that could only have come from a high-level source. These articles attract Bourne's attention—perhaps if he knew who Ross's source was, he could learn more about his own past—but they also attract the attention of yet another shadowy branch of the CIA, whose boss, Noah Vosen (Good Night and Good Luck's David Straitharn), is all too eager to eliminate anyone who poses a threat to the CIA and the secrecy surrounding its operations.

And so Bourne and the CIA bump into each other once again, and after that, the movie is essentially a series of chases and near-misses and various cat-and-mouse games up until the very last scene, as Bourne tracks the clues to Spain, Morocco and finally the United States, while the CIA sends various assassins (called "assets") to kill him and/or the people he's trying to reach before he gets any further. Along the way, Bourne receives covert assistance from Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), a CIA agent, and Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), a CIA deputy director, both of whom have become increasingly disillusioned with the agency since we last saw them.

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