Good Movie

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2007)

I really don't think I can add much more than what the 100-odd other people have posted regarding their opinion on this very fine film. As many before me have said, this is a very fine film. Smart, fast, clever, and up to the brim with adrenalin. As I told my wife after we had watched it, "This move has restored my faith in Hollywood! You see, they really can make a good movie if they want to!!" Aside from the expert way the film was crafted together, it very deftly makes a statement on how the ends do not justify the means. Something that every American citizen should remind themselves of, less we lose hold of that exceptionalism that makes America truly special in this unpleasant and frightening world.
And how clever was how they inserted 66% of the Bourne Ultimatum movie in the middle of the second movie, The Bourne Supremacy? As you know, if you saw the second movie, it ended with a phone call to the Joan Allen character from Jason Bourne as he was scoping her from across the street. Cut to the credits, that ending was played as a snappy, jazzy finish. And now in Ultimatum, we see how that whole episode was in the middle of such extraordinarily dire circumstances, and how it was so integral to the plot. Very nicely done! I haven't been so whipsawed in a movie since "The 6th Sense"!
However, just to show I'm an independent critic, not bought and sold by the movie studios, I must point out two flaws in the film that have got me thinking. First, and most obviously, what is Albert Finney doing in this movie? Didn't his character commit suicide in the second movie? It appears that he is playing a different character now in the third movie, some kind of CIA MD (who apparently never took his Hippocratic oath too seriously). What is that? The Bourne movies are otherwise as tight as a drum. And it is because they are so believable, they have so much appeal. But that believability is seriously impaired with this kind of gaffe. I don't understand why they brought Albert Finney, a great actor and certainly a very weighty presence on the screen, to play such a role without any explanation of how and why he relates to that other character in the second film.
Second, and this is very minor, but still worth mentioning, in the second film, Jason Bourne, decides not to kill the Karl Urban Russian assassin character. However, when meeting the brother of his German girlfriend, he says he did kill her. Yet another discontinuity.
Notwithstanding the two previous paragraphs, the Bourne Ultimatum is an excellent film and I recommend it to anyone who appreciates American movies of the highest order (even though the director, and half the crew are British.)