Bourne To Run

And jump and hide and shoot and drive like a maniac and quicken your pulse and bring sweat to your palms and grab you around the throat like a Teamster enforcer in a back alley, not letting you breathe! Jason Bourne is back and better than ever. Last year's reboot of the James Bond franchise was an attempt to play catch up, to do what Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has been doing since the The Bourne Identity exploded on the screen in 2002.

Directed with frenetic kinetic energy by Paul Greengrass The Bourne Ultimatum throws you into a world of super espionage agents and governmental spy agencies that seem to have eyes everywhere. Into this world walks Jason Bourne, hero of the Robert Ludlum novels, an amnesiac super assassin of remarkable ability, marked for termination by the powers that created him. Employing many of the techniques he used in the Oscar-nominated United 93, Greengrass adds one more component to this world; you. Just as you felt you were on that doomed United flight on 9/11, you feel like you are standing right next to Bourne as objects crash and splinter around you, as bodies and bullets fly, as Jason Bourne twists and spins and ducks and jabs and kicks and punches.

During some fights he moves so quick you can't even see him; he meets five agents in a hallway and in a matter of six or seven seconds of you-can't-follow blinding action they all fall. The CIA watching from a camera see it that way too and everyone in the room is staring open-mouthed in shocked silence till someone says, "My god, that's Jason Bourne." The only criticism I have heard of the film is that Greengrass's style makes it hard to know what is going on, but that only happens when that is the effect he is trying to achieve. Normally Greengrass's intent is not to obscure, but rather to mimic the scatter-shot perceptual reality of physical conflict and in doing so pull you out of your seat and into the action. Greengrass films these elaborately choreographed fights with four and five cameras and cuts them together to great effect.

Matt Damon brings the humanity to Jason Bourne that binds the viewer to the film. You get no Bruce Willis or Daniel Craig style bare-chested macho heroics; Damon's body and demeanor seem almost at odds with the horrific split-second violence it can inflict. And of course, what ties all of the Bourne films together is his quest; to find the truth about who he is and how he came to be that way.

Bourne is not out to save the Nakatomi building or New York City or the world from a mad man's scheme, he is just searching for the truth. Interestingly, that makes the enemy in all of the Bourne films the bad men running rampant through the intelligence agencies of the United States. Maybe that is why the films strike such a chord with the American people. These are times when distrust of the government is at an almost all-time high.

Returning from previous Bourne films are Julia Stiles and the amazing Joan Allen as maybe the only people in the CIA who believe in Bourne. Add to these two series-newcomers David Stratham, Scott Glenn and Albert Finney and you have a pretty powerful, well-rounded cast. However, besides Damon there is really only one other star in this film; the world. London, Paris, Madrid, Tangiers, Oxford, Riga, Berlin and Washington, DC all play roles in The Bourne Ultimatum. There are a couple of chase scenes in Tangiers in the second act that take your breath away. One is a quiet cat-and-mouse stalking, the other an adrenalin-pumping frantic roof-top assault to your senses as Bourne races to elude the local police and stop an assassination.

As you are watching, don't forget to breathe!