Paul Greengrass closes the trilogy with a chase film so lean it barely stops to breathe, and neither did we. There is not much plot beneath the running and the camera sometimes loses its footing, but the Waterloo Station sequence alone earns the evening.
Paul Greengrass took over the series from Doug Liman for The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum is his second and the trilogy’s third. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) still wants to know who turned him into a killer, and the CIA still wants him dead before he finds out. Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi have written it as one long pursuit through Moscow, London, Madrid, Tangier and New York, with the answers handed out in brief flashes between the running. It is the best of the three, it runs 115 minutes and it wastes none of them. We recommend it with a couple of reservations, which we will come to.
The Waterloo Station sequence comes early and is the reason to see the film. A journalist, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), has written about a programme called Blackbriar. Bourne phones him, the call is picked up in New York, and Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), in a room of screens, orders the station’s cameras turned on both men. What follows is Bourne walking Ross across a crowded concourse by mobile, telling him which way to look and when to stop, while Vosen’s team tracks them and a man with a rifle waits. Christopher Rouse cuts between the three, and Oliver Wood’s camera is in the crowd rather than above it, so we see what Bourne sees a fraction before he does. We did not breathe properly for the whole of it, and when it ended our shoulders were up round our ears. Rouse put them there, because he never cuts to explain, only to keep up.
Tangier is the other set piece, a chase over rooftops and through other people’s flats that ends in a bathroom where Bourne fights Desh Bouksani (Joey Ansah) with a hardback book and a towel. It is brutal and short, and when it is over Greengrass holds on Damon’s face, and the look there is shame. Damon has spent three films taking things out of Bourne’s expression, and by now there is almost nothing left but tiredness and a strange politeness. John Powell’s score drives the chases with drums and hurried strings, then drops out entirely when a killing needs to register.
Peter Wenham’s production design gives the CIA a windowless New York room of glass partitions and wall screens, where men in shirtsleeves send other men to die by saying so into a headset; most of what the film has to say is in that set. Shay Cunliffe keeps Bourne in a dark jacket and a hood, so he could be anyone in any crowd. Strathairn plays Vosen as a man who has never been wrong in his own hearing and resents the suggestion, and he is a better villain than the film needs. Joan Allen’s Pamela Landy is brought back as the conscience and does much of the job into a telephone. Julia Stiles’s Nicky Parsons is given a line about a past with Bourne that the script then walks away from, and Albert Finney turns up late as Dr. Albert Hirsch and is quietly frightening.
The reservations. Underneath the running there is not much plot, and the answer to who Bourne was is roughly the answer you would have guessed. Scott Glenn’s CIA Director Ezra Kramer exists to sign things. The politics amount to a hood over a head and a word like rendition said grimly; the film shows them, moves on, and seems pleased with itself for having shown them. And Wood’s handheld camera, which is right for Waterloo, loses its footing in the New York car chase, where for a stretch we could not have said which vehicle was which. Most critics forgave that more readily than we did. It costs the sequence some of its fear, because you cannot be frightened for a car you cannot find.
Set against the series, it is quicker and colder than Liman’s The Bourne Identity and less grieving than Supremacy, and it is the one where everything Greengrass had been working at comes off. The Bond films had already changed their manner in response by the time Casino Royale arrived, and this is still the leaner of the two.
Watch it with the sound up and the lights off, and do not expect to remember the story in the morning. You will remember the station.
