Bourne to run

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) searches for his identity in The Bourne Ultimatum. (Jasin Boland/Universal Studios)

There’s no gentle courtship in The Bourne Ultimatum, no easing into the relationship. After a fleeting title or two, the film detonates onto the screen smack in the middle of a hand-to-hand, gun-to-gun fight scene in Moscow. At the centre of the jittery action is former CIA operative and fugitive Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), devoid of body fat and sporting a minimalist brush cut, presumably so he can move at maximum speed; even his nose is blunted, as if a tip would just slow him down. We get the sense that in the gap between this and the last instalment, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, Bourne has never stopped fighting and running. You half expect him to look directly into the lens, mid-fisticuffs, and ask: Where the hell have you been, anyway?

We’ve been waiting, man, and missing the killer intelligence and seat-popping thrill of the best action franchise out there. Director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93), who took over number two from Doug Liman’s premier The Bourne Identity (2002), has a knack for making movies that blow your hair back. But the duck-and-weave cutting and over the shoulder handheld shots aren’t just rock video strutting. Greengrass does highly disciplined chaos. His visual herky-jerky is all about paranoia and anxiety, a manifestation of a system gone hairy. Like Bourne, Greengrass would like to slow down, but he just can’t afford to.

A Jason Bourne less addled by conscience originated in Robert Ludlum’s 1980s paperback thrillers. The cinematic Bourne is a more contemporary, post 9/11 creation. Reared in a secret CIA black-ops program long since abandoned, Bourne is a techno-gothic nightmare: a machine that’s becoming a man. Suffering flashes of guilt over a life as an errand boy for the government, he’s spent two films trying to recover his memory, sifting through reams of passports and identities to find his own.

The CIA doesn’t like a lot of soul-searching from its staff, so Bourne’s most dangerous adversaries are the people who made him. In Ultimatum, his higher-ups — the serpentine Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) and more sympathetic Pam Landy (Joan Allen) — cat-and-mouse their monster from video surveillance rooms, backed by the privacy-violating permission of the Patriot Act. But superspy Bourne continually outsmarts them, undoing their so-called intelligence from exotic locales like Turin, Paris, London and a spectacular, rarely seen Tangiers.

Damon has proven himself a formidable actor of late, doing an underrated manic turn in The Departed, and muting his golden-boy quality for something admirably internal in The Good Shepherd, a CIA film more ambivalent about its subject than the Bournes (maybe Damon should move on from CIA movies and try something new — like the FBI). There’s not much dialogue in the film, and when Bourne does talk, it’s in the scratchy, post-flu voice of a man who doesn’t have much opportunity to chat. Mostly, he communicates with his body; there is nothing sinewy or romantically Bond-ian in Damon’s performance. He’s a blunt object with the single goal shared by many philosophy graduate students: to locate the self. In flashbacks, Bourne remembers his spy training as a series of torture and humiliation sessions where he was hooded and subjected to waterboarding, images that have come to embody a certain brand of “justified” inhumanity. Did he really choose this life, then, or was it forced upon him?

From left: Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and Tom Cronin (Tom Gallup) try to track down Jason Bourne from a New York CIA office. (Jasin Boland/Universal Studios)

From his hub at CIA headquarters, Bourne’s nemesis, twitchy, angular Vosen — a convincing, against-type performance from Strathairn — doesn’t think it matters. “Do whatever it takes to save American lives,” he says, issuing a kill-first warrant for Bourne. The response to the CIA’s familiar America-at-all-costs position comes several scenes later when Bourne is cornered, staring into the eyes of an upgraded version of himself. The killer who has him at gunpoint is one of the next generation of trained assassins called “assets.”  “Look what they ask us to give,” says Bourne.

Of course, this depiction of the CIA as corrupt and maybe even unnecessary — a warped exercise in sacrifice without accountability — is decidedly liberal, and perhaps even naive. But whether you buy the film’s politics, it benefits from that core of moral certainty, just as the conservative Rambo-movies did from their own. But unlike First Blood, The Bourne Ultimatum is also, on more than one occasion — but particularly on one occasion — intentionally and bitterly funny.

At the top of the CIA’s rotten food chain is Dr. Albert Hirsch, who made Bourne a tabula rasa, and then rewired him for the Agency. Albert Finney plays the bad doctor as a study in medical and patriotic hubris, rolling his r’s and chins with equal grotesqueness. He is Bourne’s ultimate goal, the metaphorical biological daddy who holds all the answers to his son’s traumas. 

Trying to get to him, Bourne runs through several top-notch action set-pieces; one car chase generated girly squeals of delight in the theatre of jaded critics where I saw the film. The pursuit always takes place in crowds, which is where ideology gets bloody these days. The most remarkable sequence takes place during rush hour in London’s Waterloo Station. A journalist for the Guardian newspaper (scene-stealer Paddy Considine) who knows too much is being hunted after the CIA picks up a top-secret code word he utters on his cellphone. Bypassing a massive web of surveillance — closed-circuit TVs, moles, phone taps — Bourne gets the reporter on an off-grid cellphone, and attempts to talk him through the quagmire and save his life. It’s not an easy job when every other person in the thronging crowd is a CIA marksman waiting to attack. The hyperventilating journalist, who makes several dumb, very real mistakes, can’t believe this is happening, and that the government is behind it. In other words, he is one of us, which is what Bourne wants to be, too — blissfully ignorant and fully human, no longer strangled by information, and living dead.

The Bourne Ultimatum opens across Canada August 3.

Katrina Onstad writes for CBCnews.ca Arts. 

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