The Bourne trilogy proved one movie too long

Rating: 3/10 (18 November 2007)

I entered the theatre almost certain of treating myself with two hours of well-written though action-packed spy thriller. I left it over-bored by the constant suspension of disbelief required by the movie to accept even the simplest twists of the story, all relying on coincidence and wild guess instead of necessity - see the Tangiers manhunt to get an idea - and disappointed by the utter irrelevance of the final "revelation" which in retrospect deflate the moral quest the entire trilogy is built upon.
So a secret agent needs to be programmed to kill targets at the Agency request? Unbelievable as it is, this only means that he has possibly chosen the wrong career, and the Government has wasted the taxpayers money by recruiting a subject unsuitable for the job. To discover that the agent himself enrolled voluntarily to the conditioning program only depicts Bourne as a weak character, by being first in need of some extra boost to sustain his vocation, then by collapsing guilt-ridden.
Two minor notations. First on style: the frantically fuzzy cinematography may well be urgent and subjective and in the middle of the action, but dispenses the director with accurately staged hunts, crashes and all that in an action movie requires to be choreographed. Throughout the entire "Bourne Ultimatum" you have to guess to complete the picture of what's happening on screen beyond simple dynamic effects, and in the end you can't escape fatigue and the feeling of a sloppy production.
Second: Matt Damon. I don't discuss here his acting skills, which for this kind of movie are more than adequate - elsewhere I usually find him wooden - but simply his being physically capable of holding the title of "sexiest man alive" recently bestowed on him by "People". Not in his prime for some time now, in this last Bourne incarnation the broad, coarse features of his face are more evident than ever, singling him out as a natural candidate for an "Elephant Man" remake. He's certainly redefining the concept of sexy, outstretching it to the point where no suspension of disbelief is ever possible.