THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – paul greengrass – 9.3 / 10

As anyone who’s talked with me (or, more accurately, listened to me talk) about movies for any length of time can tell you, I generally hate movies that employ a shaky handheld camera aesthetic. In fact, I even disliked it pretty severely in The Bourne Supremacy, this film’s immediate predecessor. The look is meant to convey immediacy and a you-are-there sense of documentary realism. But for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere, that never works for me. It succeeds only in making the film in question seem cheap and slapdash. Mostly it just makes we me want to send the director a gift certificate for a tripod. But then along comes The Bourne Ultimatum, the exception that proves the rule.

Paul Greengrass’s second Bourne film (and his fourth or fifth to employ this style) utilizes the shaky camera aesthetic in a way that’s compelling, engrossing and never once distracting or off-putting. Maybe after all this time Greengrass has finally figured out how to make this style work effectively (though I’ll wait to see Green Zone before making that determination). Or maybe it’s just that the story here is so tightly wound, the action so fast-paced and kinetic that it doesn’t matter if you can’t follow every single detail. When there’s this much going on, the viewer just hangs on for dear life and tries to keep up. Personally, I often found myself feeling like the minor character towards the end of the film who, after witnessing one of Bourne’s miraculous escapes, tells his boss, ‘Sir, he, uh, just drove off the roof.’ There’s really no way to process or fully comprehend everything you’re seeing. Just hang on and enjoy it.

In The Bourne Ultimatum, unlike in every indie drama or European art film that utilizes the same style, the sense of realism, momentum and immediacy that the handheld approach is supposed to convey actually works. For instance, the climactic car chase through Midtown Manhattan in broad daylight (a feat in and of itself) is as kinetic and brutal as if you were actually standing on the sidewalk watching it happen. The fact that the chase employs a couple new tricks and a few camera angles I’ve never seen before is an added bonus. And the nifty way the chase resolves itself would certainly be endlessly copied if not for the fact that’s it’s so memorable here.

The foot chase through the streets and across the rooftops of Tangier is equally impressive. Besides just being really damn exciting, this sequence is most impressive for its clarity. There are multiple parties concerned in the chase-- all of them with different objectives and different paths to their targets-- and yet somehow Greengrass manages to keep his audience on solid footing the entire time, always knowing where the characters are in relation to each other. The way it’s done here is so smooth it seems effortless. Compare that to something like, say, the forest battle in Transformers 2. There you have a much simpler fight with distinctly different looking characters in what is basically a wide open space and it’s pretty much impossible to tell what’s going on.

Then there’s the Waterloo train station sequence, a sequence that will be studied and dissected in film classes for generations. Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne is trying to shepherd to safety a reporter who has unwittingly stumbled across the governmental conspiracy that created Bourne and the other ‘assets’ like him. The CIA has operatives on the ground, a team of technicians patched into the station’s cameras and an assassin lurking behind a billboard. With so much going on in such a crowded area and all of it edited at such breakneck speed, the sequence is dizzyingly complex. And yet the audience is never lost for even a second. That alone is impressive. That the sequence is also unique, innovative and utterly enthralling marks it as a true cinematic achievement.

The Waterloo Station sequence is one of those rare times where an action setpiece works so flawlessly that it defies easy explanation. Because it relies solely on filmmaking skill for its success (instead of computer generated visual effects or practical stunt work), there’s no way to ‘figure out’ this sequence. You can’t look at a shot and think, ‘Oh, that’s a stunt man’ or ‘That must have been CG.’ And because all of its tricks are hidden behind the invisible art of the edit, it’s that much easier to get completely caught up in it. It’s funny, I guess, that in a time when just about anything is possible with the assistance of computers (ahem Avatar), the best action sequence in recent memory doesn’t need them at all.

There is, of course, more to The Bourne Ultimatum than just a bunch of really cool action setpieces. There’s also the way the filmmakers worked Supremacy’s studio-mandated coda (the scene where Bourne calls Pamela Landy from across the street) into the film in a way that turns what had been an unwanted scene into something that’s now indelible to the series. There’s also the pretty terrific call back to The Bourne Identity when, at the end of the film Bourne quotes Clive Owens’s character’s dying words. And, if you really want to dig into the marrow of the film, there’s also a bunch of interesting stuff about the ultimate enemy being within. But for me it’s enough that The Bourne Ultimatum is a relentlessly ass-kicking action machine. It’s all that hyperbolic stuff (edge of your seat, roller coaster, thrill ride) that every movie’s ads promise but almost none deliver. And that alone is a rare accomplishment worth celebrating.