The ‘‘Bourne’’ series makes for an unusual action franchise. All the movies are exhilarating, including the third installment, ‘‘The Bourne Ultimatum,’’ which opens tonight and leaves a bruise. Part of what makes them so good is that they’re all-inclusive. You could take your mother, your teenage kids, your mailman, your history professor, and your dog — everybody goes home happy. The movies are smart — smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.
A killer 'Ultimatum'
Matt Damon is smarter and tougher than ever in his third 'Bourne' outing
There’s a great early sequence in ‘‘Ultimatum’’ in which Bourne, fresh from avenging his girlfriend’s death in the previous movie and now in London’s crowded Waterloo Station, manipulates a meeting with a reporter in the know (Paddy Considine) whose top-level contacts have won the murderous attention of the CIA. Via cellphone, Bourne choreographs the guy’s every move. These scenes are funny, suspenseful, and exquisitely shot and edited in a first for the movies: a pas de deux by remote control.
Bourne’s memory is working again and, with the help of Julia Stiles’ conflicted CIA agent (her part is bigger now and her hair streakier), a mental picture of his exploiters is forming. As he gets closer to putting all the pieces together, he’ll have similar dances with David Strathairn and Joan Allen as the pair of feds increasingly at odds with each other over how to handle Bourne’s eventual descent upon their offices in Manhattan. The movie, written by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, and George Nolfi, seems to be digging into our current surveillance and espionage quandaries.
Strathairn’s character spends half the movie dispatching skilled men to kill Bourne. They’re called assets, and as the film trots the globe each city offers an asset who’s hilariously ethnically appropriate and model-handsome. It’s as if John Casablancas has started an assassins agency.
These films are lean and swift. The violence comes in bursts but lasts as long as some musical numbers — there are fights and chases here that would knock Bob Fosse into next week and make Bruce Lee break down in tears. The documentary transparency is characteristic of Paul Greengrass. He directed both this new installment and the previous one, 2004’s ‘‘The Bourne Supremacy,’’ as well as the Sept. 11 drama ‘‘United 93.’’
That transparent quality makes his ‘‘Bourne’’ movies seem unadulterated and unalloyed. In
other words: absurdly real, despite Bourne’s apparent indestructibility. The landed blows
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