The Arction of BOURNE

That's not a typo. Rather, it's our critic's suggested term for the brilliance of Matt Damon's last two trips to the Jason Bourne altar.
By Brent Simon, FilmStew.com
If actors typically have but a small handful of roles that define them, it's also true that sometimes an actor completely defines the role. In those cases, it's not just quote-unquote impossible to envision anyone else in the part; it's that their own physicality and innate attributes imbue the character with perhaps heretofore unscripted but now inescapably essential traits. Such is the case with Matt Damon and amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne, ne David Webb — the tightly coiled, pit-bull seeker at the heart of the hard-charging Bourne trilogy.
ADVERTISEMENT Damon isn't short, per se, but his compact frame hardly gives off the air of someone who's a professional killer. What Damon does have is a swallowed intensity and intellectual awareness of his surroundings, and he impresses these traits upon Bourne, hardening his close-set eyes to match a clenched jaw of resoluteness. With Damon, you see the whirring inner motor of Jason Bourne, as he absorbs information at a high rate of speed and then translates that into both rapid analysis and breathless action. Despite any and all story points, he is the jockey driving this series, exhorting it forward in inexorable fashion.
The utterly absorbing The Bourne Ultimatum, then, finally delivers some redemption for Bourne, even if it's chiefly of the cold-comfort variety. Alone and still on the lam, Bourne stumbles across details about his CIA days exploits in a London newspaper, details which obviously come from a well-connected (read: intra-agency) source. Feeling that this individual could provide him valuable information about his own past, he contacts investigative reporter Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), who's been slipped information about Blackbriar, a spin-off element of the top secret Treadstone black-ops program from the first two movies in the series. Bourne sets up a meeting on the fly, then detects and disables a CIA snatch-and-grab team — sent by forward-leaning section chief Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), who's out to identify and quell the source of their leak by nabbing Ross.
When the CIA suddenly finds Bourne back on their radar screen, Vosen and the head of the CIA, Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn), put him in play as a target, fearing he's out to expose the questionable legality of their clandestine rub-out program. Two more or less sympathetic figures from Bourne's past, CIA bureaucrat Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and junior operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), come into the picture. A power struggle then ensues between Landy, who favors trying to bring Bourne in, and Vosen, who feels his end-of-the-spear authority gives him the right to wipe out the ex-agent and all those who aid him, including Parsons and any civilian that gets in the way.
While "gorno," the hybrid name for the hardcore gore-porn of the Saw, Hostel and The Hills Have Eyes franchises, as well as such recent films as Captivity, has hooked on, at least with a very particular niche of zeitgeist surfers, there's unfortunately not necessarily reason to think that my own amalgam for last two Bourne films — "arction," a halved blend of art and action — will catch on with the pop cultural mainstream and enter the modern day movie vernacular.
I think that's chiefly because the degree of difficulty for these types of films is so high. Yet make no mistake, that's what The Bourne Ultimatum is — even the movie's few quiet, contemplative moments have a sense of unease that runs parallel to the rest of the film's careening forward momentum. Returning director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy) achieves this feeling via an approach which requires that Bourne be kept palpably uncomfortable — forced to constantly react and improvise.
As always, too, Greengrass trades in small details that mightily inform character, and thus help elevate The Bourne Ultimatum above its genre roots. In a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse at a packed London Waterloo Station, a single quick glance conveys that Bourne has deduced the angle of a gunshot that has felled a bystander; later, after a ferocious close range action sequence, the director indulges Bourne a moment of quiet, broken shame over the fact that he's been forced to kill again.
The film's basic story is very contemporary in its subject matter — a covert intelligence program targeting, and in some cases eliminating, U.S. citizens — but The Bourne Ultimatum scores its marks courtesy of Damon's involving performance and, of course, some slam-bang, real-world action that largely eschews CGI flavoring in favor of more practical stagings.
Cinematographer Oliver Wood, who's shot the entire Bourne series, utilizes lots of dirty, over-the-shoulder coverage, and his handheld compositions retain their usual tint and anxiety. The camerawork also skews strongly to further underline identification with Bourne.
If there are complaints here, it's that this aggressive, sometimes wobbly approach does occasionally wear thin when it comes to some of the movie's action. It matches the up close and personal nature of most of the film's hand-to-hand combat and panicky scenes of escape, but a few sequences would benefit, in both clarity and tension, from a more bolted down approach. Another demerit is certainly that the movie's hands-on antagonists (Joey Ansah, Edgar Ramirez) - fellow assassins sent to fell Bourne - aren't really fleshed out or even given as solid an air of mystery as Clive Owen's "Professor" in The Bourne Identity.
Small quibbles, though, really. The Bourne Ultimatum earns its authorial title, and Damon turns Bourne's personal awakening into a shared, communal pay-off. In other words, a thoroughly worthwhile bit of arction.