The Bourne Ultimatum **** (Out of Five)

The Bourne movies have drawn a lot of attention of the years. They're action movies with an actual character, that are smart and riveting and cool without being stupid. It's easy to make things explode and kill off characters, but the Jason Bourne on the other hand is a guy who knows what he's doing. In fact, Matt Damon is so good in the title role and often one man show that we forget to give him credit for his resolve and believability. Without Matt Damon could Bourne really exist and be successful?

In The Bourne Ultimatum we have a movie that's more frenzied, confused, and complicated than the earlier two installments. The first film, The Bourne Identity was a success with its story telling and it's traditionally well done sequences. The second film, The Bourne Supremaucy, was a frenzied, confusing film with Paul Grengrass behind the camera. It wasn't, however, anywhere near as frenzied, confusing, or riveting in the I don't feel like I can miss a second of this way that The Bourne Ultimatum is.

I don't know what it is that has nearly every series taking in one of it's installments the need to be interminetelly confusing and usually unnecssary complex. The "complexity", although I hardly want to call it that, of the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie was all but that installments death. Characters did things for no reason, and the movie jolted us from one contrived sequence to another with not even a pretense of plot to get us there. The movie was shooting before the script was finished and it shows through dozens of loose ends and double-crossings needed to get the "story" to all it's sequences.

The third Spiderman wasn't much better (to be fair the third Pirate movie was somewhat of a redemption for the series.) And here we have Bourne following in those footsteps. Instead, which seems a staple of the series, Bourne does it in a much smarter, enjoyable way. Pirates was such a mess I wanted to leave in the first half hour, but Bourne keeps you almost uncomfortably riveted for the whole time with it's pacing and intrigue. And it's complexities are things if transparency that we know will, in the end, be more or less solved although the more I want The Bourne Supremacy the less I understand the plot. In short, in Pirates we don't know what's going on at the moment, in Ultimatum everything is rushing by so fastly we can hardly take it all in.

In the previous Bourne films we went to two or three key locations, in Ultimatum we probably visit at least five and after the first half hour the director and editors stopped telling us where we were, and they ocasionally leave us guessing although most of the time they make it clear for a quick shot that lets us know, New York, London, or some city in Morocco.

They always seems to be some sort of disconnect in movies that weren't orginally intentioned to be a trilolgy, as the Bourne series has become. And, that being said, the final mystery of Jason Bourne is at least a little disappointing. Still, the movie certainly has its moments, it's key sequence being what seems a thirty minute car, scooter, and foot chase through Morocco. It seems to be one of the most contemplated and seamlessly thrilling sequence in recent history, as it frenziedly follows three threads. And, in the end, the theme of the Bourne movies is made evident and your money proves mostly worthwhile if only for what might be the film's greatest accomplishment, it's exposure of the lies in which our government operates.

I'll end with a line from Derek Webb's "A Love that's Stronger Than Our Fear" which says expictly what the film strong hints. "What if someone would tell you the truth/But only if you tortured them half to death/Since when do the means justify the ends/And we build the kingdom using the devil's tools." That thematic content which has been brewing since the beginning is a good reason to see the movie even if you weren't planning on it.