The Bourne Ultimatum

Unless you have a giant-screen home theater, Hollywood action movies are never really a great fit for home watching. Many of their virtues—high-speed car chases, death-defying stunts, jumpy cinematography—are blunted significantly when reduced to your (okay, my) 20-inch TV screen. And so, since embracing our exile from movie theaters, Whitney and I have tended to satisfy our jones for such movies with "smart" action films—those in which the plot and character development get a bit more emphasis than usual for the genre. Unfortunately, they're not so easy to find.

It had been a while since our last venture, but we had been looking forward to The Bourne Ultimatum's arrival on DVD. The first two entries in the Bourne series were remarkably sharp, intelligent films. Neither Whitney nor I initially found the idea of Matt Damon as an action hero particularly plausible, but as it turned out, the actor's trademark grim skepticism has made Jason Bourne one of the more compelling characters in action-movie history.

This movie picks up pretty much where The Bourne Supremacy left off, with Bourne escaping from police in Moscow. (I probably can't get those unfamiliar with the series entirely up to speed, but in a nutshell: Bourne is a CIA assassin who's lost his memory; both the CIA itself and various illicit splinter groups have been trying to find him and shut him up for, well, a few entire feature films.) Soon thereafter, he sees an article about himself in a British newspaper and contacts its author, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), to find out what the journalist knows about his past.

Unfortunately for both of them, their phone conversation is overheard by the CIA, which is still worried about public exposure of the secret program of which Bourne was an integral part. So Bourne's meeting with Ross in a London train station is interrupted by an assassin, who kills Ross. Bourne escapes with Ross's notes; they lead him to Madrid, where he hopes to find Ross's source. The CIA follows, its director (Scott Glenn) having sided with deputy director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) against agent Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, back after Supremacy), who feels Bourne is not a threat. And so the chase is on, from Spain to Tangiers to Bourne's origins in New York City.

Ultimatum's script (cowritten by Michael Clayton writer-director Tony Gilroy) is as smart as its predecessors' were, and director Paul Greengrass keeps everything moving along snappily while providing truly outstanding action sequences. As usual in the Bourne films, the cast couldn't be better—this series has now set its protagonist up against many of the great character actors of our time: Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, Allen, and Strathairn.

And yet I have to say I was a little disappointed. In part, that's just because Supremacy, in particular, raised the bar so high. In Ultimatum, we know almost immediately where the battle lines will be drawn, and nothing much happens to make us question our assumptions, even falsely. The movie becomes a series of "How will Bourne get out of this one?" sequences—and while they're all designed and shot brilliantly, they sometimes fall a bit flat, since we pretty much know he will get out of them. The payoff is supposed to be Bourne's discovery of who he really is, but even that revelation turns out to be a bit anticlimactic.

It's true that I might be raving about The Bourne Ultimatum had I seen it on the big screen (and not my 20-inch). The action is really marvelously executed, and the script is still smarter than that of almost any other movie of its kind. On my couch, though, I'd been allowing myself to hope for a bit more.