Starring: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Paddy Considine, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney, Edgar Ramirez, Joey Ansah
Director: Paul Greengrass
Scheduled release: Now showing

Three screenwriters are credited for The Bourne Ultimatum, though it’s hard to imagine what exactly they all did to earn their pay cheques. “You don’t remember anything, do you?” “It’s Bourne.” “It ends here.” Insert car chase. That doesn’t mean that this third instalment of the popular shaky-cam travelogue spy thriller series doesn’t deliver all it’s intended to, and occasionally more, it just means you’re more likely to hear barked commands or the sound of squealing tires and shattering glass than actors exchanging full sentences. This is a film that asks exactly how much traditional storytelling structure you can cleave away and still have a coherent and engaging piece of work. The answer: nearly all of it.

Coming off last year’s abysmally underrated United 93, director Paul Greengrass thankfully returns for his second film in the series about the titular amnesiac CIA-trained assassin (Matt Damon) with identity issues. Although the resulting film is not nearly up to the hard-to-match bar set by its predecessor, The Bourne Supremacy, it’s hard to imagine any other current director being able to keep up the relentless pace delivered by Ultimatum. Unfortunately, it’s also all too easy to see that the filmmakers and Damon are coasting when they could be soaring.

The stripped-down storyline that powers the film with motorized intensity concerns Bourne’s identity. Having lost his girlfriend in the previous film, and spent a few years running from various rogue CIA elements who want to eliminate an embarrassment before it can cause them any political damage, Bourne is now hot on the trail of his missing identity. It’s clear somebody inside the agency is talking, as Bourne reads stories about himself in the Guardian by an investigative journalist (Paddy Considine, nicely twitchy) who must have a highly placed source. The agency elements are pretty hot to keep Bourne away from the secret programme that created brainwashed killing machines like himself, and so the assassins – a number of whom, in an interesting twist, seem as relentlessly lethal and mindless as Bourne himself – come out of the woodwork to give chase in a variety of locations, from Tangiers to midtown Manhattan to an extended and exceptionally taut chase and surveillance sequence set in London’s cavernous Waterloo Station. Needless to say, by brains and brawn, Bourne burrows ever closer to discovering the secret of the identity that’s been eluding him as he races from one exotic European locale to another.

It would be ludicrous to say that The Bourne Ultimatum is not a thriller worth notice. Greengrass’s hyperfluid direction and Oliver Wood’s documentary-style cinematography make for an addictive mix, a pared-down action series for the post-9/11 era, more about speed, lethality and moral grey zones than cartoonish villains and sarcastic quips. But there’s a limit to how far you can push this style, and the film flirts with that limit quite seriously. In long stretches little to no dialogue occurs, beyond shouted directions to the thankless drones monitoring surveillance footage for the CIA as they track Bourne around the globe. Once Bourne gets closer to his target (the occasional pained flashback cutting in, giving glimpses of the training programme that turned him into the killer he is), it’s difficult to feel the necessary emotional impact for him, since the series has worked so hard at turning him into such a robotic entity.

It’s much easier to impress an audience with masterfully assembled chases or killer martial arts moves – and a couple of extraordinarily bruising fight scenes here are unlike anything Hollywood has produced in quite a while – than it is to get that audience to feel a human empathy for the man negotiating all that lethal territory. The audience may clap for Bourne when he executes a particularly smart manoeuvre (has there ever been a screen spy who has so flawlessly mixed graceful cunning with predatory nerve?) but will they feel for him when he’s confronted by a woman he loved from the past but whom the amnesia has erased from his mind? Does it even matter? Probably not: a fourth film is most likely on the way, but it would be nice if, in the future, the filmmakers remembered that Bourne was human, and treated him as such.

Chris Barsanti