A Nutshell Review: The Bourne Ultimatum

Rating: 10/10 (9 August 2007)

Move aside Transformers. Retire John McClane. Matt Damon is back as the best of the best prototype secret agent-assassin Jason Bourne, and his Ultimatum wins the best action movie of the summer, hands down and without a single thread of doubt! Loosely based on the Robert Ludlum novels of the same name, the movie version starring Damon in the titular role, have already established itself as serious, slick, and got almost everything right in the spy movie genre. It owned James Bond, and in my opinion, possibly one of the best franchises out there.
Though the poster of the movie had Damon in a pose resembling Mark Wahlberg, the Bourne series is clearly the movies that boosted Damon's bankability as an A-list star, as we follow with much interest how Jason Bourne suffers from amnesia from Identity, to being hunted down and out for personal revenge in Supremacy, before coming back home to discover the background and truth of his identity in Ultimatum, which for some parts, had Wolverine styled flashbacks into a highly top secret project within the depths of the CIA.
In this cat and mouse game, he becomes both the hunter and the hunted, interchanging between the roles as he tries to outwit the slew of assassins coming after him, since he's accused of committing treason and being the source of a leak. He's been on the run for three years, and there's no letting up, no thanks to Noah Vosen (David Strathaim) from the CIA, out for his blood, and who reports to someone who might hold the key to Bourne's own past. It's suspenseful action from the get go all the way to the end, and once it grips you, there's no letting go. The adrenaline you get from watching Ultimatum, is simply an indescribable feeling of joy for any action junkie out there.
With tight links to the earlier movies, it pays if you have watched them prior to this, as Bourne maneuvers his way to find out who he is, and at the same time, build on the trust already established with his previous hunter Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), who becomes his off the record source of help from the inside. Julia Stiles returns too as Nicky Parsons, and fans of Stiles will be glad with her slightly expanded role here providing that tinge of sexual tension between herself and Jason Bourne.
The action scenes marked a slight departure from its predecessors, but for the better. The close quartered fisticuffs combat in the earlier movies have rather been quite a hallmark, as Bourne dispatches his opponents with hard hitting series of punches and kicks, and contained what is probably more realistic human to human fights which doesn't seem choreographed given its realism. But having too much of a good thing becomes a repetitive bore, and thankfully, such scenes are kept short and sharp, and few and far between. What is excellent here, is how Bourne utilizes more of his smarts to outwit, outplay and outlast his opponents, and those sequences in England and New York are testament to that - smart, adrenaline pumping, thrilling, and at the end of it, you can't help but to cheer!
Like any self-respecting spy movie, Ultimatum had its fair share of jetsetting locations in Europe clocking up frequent flyer miles. Nothing beats having to go to new location after new location where the story takes you, and being a man on the run, this is but part of standard protocol. And the movie can't be complete without the complimentary car chase sequence, and this Paul Greengrass directed installment could possibly have one of the best I've seen in re cent years, with the car as a battering ram, and everything going boom and bang right at your face, directly to the camera. I reckon if watch on the IMAX, you'll probably start to cower and shield yourself from the flying debris.
The Bourne Ultimatum is a winner, and a fine wrap up of the franchise should it choose to end at this point. Besides the ending of Smokin Aces, the ending here will also be one of my personal favourites, as it cunningly showed everything coming to full circle, and with Moby's Extreme Ways, the theme song used in all the Damon-Bourne movies, comes blaring through the speakers, it's just plain sweetness...