"The Bourne Ultimatum"

I think fans of the previous two Bourne movies may fear that reading too much about "The Bourne Ultimatum" could spoil their pleasure of it. But there's barely a plot to spoil -- there's only movement, and sensation. Joan Allen reappears as Pamela Landy, the CIA honcho who's entrusted with trapping the elusive Bourne, even as her sympathy for him (and her distrust of the organization she works for) increases. Paddy Considine plays an earnest Guardian journalist whose title is "security correspondent," and if any actor has the face of an earnest Guardian journalist, it's Considine: Even his eyes ask unanswerable questions. Scott Glenn appears as the lizardlike director of the CIA, who wants his orders followed without having to dirty his own mitts. David Strathairn is a Company bigwig, an arrogant mirror image of the Edward R. Murrow he gave us in "Good Night, and Good Luck." And Albert Finney, an actor whose face I don't believe I could ever tire of, appears as -- well, that you really don't want to know.

Greengrass doesn't pace "The Bourne Ultimatum" in the usual way, building tension and then allowing it to release before starting up the whole process again. Instead, he uses the movie's first few minutes to establish a pulse. After that, all of the movie's beats -- its anxious moments and its calmer ones -- hit in response to that pulse. Greengrass' methods as a filmmaker have always felt more organic than mechanical, especially in his greatest picture, the 2002 "Bloody Sunday," an account of the Jan. 30, 1972, massacre on the streets of Derry, Northern Ireland, in which 13 unarmed civil rights protesters were killed by British soldiers. Greengrass doesn't shy away from making the horrors of history feel immediate and disturbingly alive.

Maybe guys like Greengrass should be reserved only for serious pictures about serious subjects, movies like "Bloody Sunday" and "United 93" (the latter a picture whose mere existence I have problems with, as much as I respect Greengrass' technique and approach). Then again, action movies desperately need more guys like Greengrass. The violence in "The Bourne Ultimatum" is exciting, all right. But very few contemporary directors know how to film action and violence with the kind of chaotic clarity Greengrass does. That may seem like a contradiction, but Greengrass knows how to use a movie frame so we know where to look every instant -- and still, we can't ever be certain that we're catching it all, because violence by its nature is unmanageable. In a street chase sequence set in Tangier, Morocco, Bourne runs for his life through courtyards and across rooftops, leaping from building to building through windows that aren't always open. Part of the sequence involves a motorbike chase, but Greengrass presents it as an example of boyish shenanigans with real-life consequences. And in the fight sequences, Greengrass never lets us forget that every landed punch causes real pain: One, in particular, is so beautifully choreographed that it left me feeling a little heartsick, as if I'd just watched a perfectly executed tragic love scene. In that sequence, a book is used as a weapon, a bitter rejoinder to the generally comforting idea that books are our friends.

"The Bourne Ultimatum" is a movie packed with exploding fragments of information. As Bourne repeatedly rattles the padlocked chain wrapped around his memory, we see and hear shards of the past he can't remember: Bourne hooded and bound, being roughed up by men whose faces we can't see; voices speaking in broken-up phrases (" ... tank treatment ..." "... hasn't slept for 52 hours ...").

At one point a character states flatly, "We are the sharp end of the stick," meaning that this not-so-royal "we" answers to no one. If someone, anyone, needs to be disposed of, there's no paperwork to fill out, no clearance needed from the higher-ups. A murder can be ordered up like a pizza; a previous, sensible decision can be overturned with a single phone call. Against all of that, a guy like Jason Bourne, with his mangled brain and whirring conscience, shouldn't stand a chance -- and yet he's the last man standing. They've given him a number and taken away his name, but what he stands for can't be so easily erased.

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