Film

Racing limp-legged through the snow-covered streets of Moscow, a wounded Jason Bourne (Damon) breaks into a pharmacy, injects himself with pain medication, and then quickly dispatches his pursuers with equal measures brute force, physical grace and a heavy conscience. In just the first few moments of the third Bourne movie, first-rate British director Greengrass (United 93, Bloody Sunday) establishes the blood-pumping pace and satisfying patterns of this international espionage thriller, and never lets go.

In The Bourne Identity, amnesiac CIA assassin Bourne sets out to discover who he was; in The Bourne Supremacy, he uncovers his CIA past. With Ultimatum, Bourne goes deeper, seeking to understand how he became a one-man killing machine and to find those responsible. Bourne’s soul may be at stake, but it’s the adrenaline-rushing cat-and-mouse game that drives the film: the way he masterfully outmaneuvers a team of CIA operatives in a crowded British train station or leaps through a chain of windows in Tangier apartments to save a key ally (Stiles, in a contrived, but welcomed return).

Filmed in the shaky handheld manner that has been Greengrass’s vérité hallmark, Ultimatum should please fans of the prior movies, with its knowing references to pretty women with black-dyed cut-short hair and bodies floating in water. The weakest dramatic link is the rivalry between two competing CIA chiefs, whose tête-à-têtes set up a simplistic bad CIA (Strathairn) versus good CIA (Allen) division. But the conflict does offer the film its chilling political currency. Beneath the heart-racing action, Ultimatum strains to show how aggressive Bush-era tactics lead to our moral ruin.