The Bourne Ultimate Supreme Identity, with nuts and a cherry

I’m going to take a break from restaurants this week and give you a review of the most recent movie I saw. The Bourne Ultimatum is the third in a series of action/adventure movies about Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a super spy whose CIA special training has made him virtually impossible to catch or kill.

In Ultimatum, Bourne has flashbacks about his pre-CIA identity and digs around to find out more about the top-secret training program that made him what he is. Like its predecessors, this movie is packed with appealing characters, clever escapes, and insane stunts. The energy never lets up as Bourne matches wits with CIA bigwigs, a room full of trackers at CIA headquarters, and a field agent who’s been through the same training he has. The plot has some interesting twists, but nothing that will knock you off the edge of the theater seat you’ll be perched on for most of the movie.

Two things I didn’t like:

First, the third movie uses some of the same film techniques as the second, with the camera bouncing along after Bourne as if it were in the chase car. The second movie was full of scenes like that, turning what could have been a good movie into a nausea-inducing debacle. Thankfully, Ultimatum only uses the technique in one or two scenes, but one scene is pretty long. I spent ten minutes of the movie staring at the back of the seat in front of me.

Second, since this was the last book in the series, I expected the movie to wrap things up pretty well, but they couldn’t resist throwing in an unanswered question or two and a cliffhanger ending, leaving us wondering. Maybe they’re planning to make another one twenty years down the road, like the four or five 1980s movie series that have recently been added to. This was a good series, but I think Jason Bourne has been through enough and should be allowed to retire in peace!