This was the second high-quality action film this summer…the first being Live Free Or Die Hard. There are some significant differences between the two movies, though. LFODH is all about Bruce Willis’s ability to still play John McClane and the director’s ability to stage showy set pieces involving explosions and equipment. TBU, in contrast, rests on Matt Damon’s low-key delivery, a simple, propulsive storyline and efficient camerawork.

As much as I like Paul Greengrass’s style, though, it can be tiring.

There was way too much tense music throughout. I wasn’t as impressed with this one as with the previous two. But there were some fun moments.

While not being a fan of the first two, I have to say I liked this the best of the three. Still don’t like the shaky camera work, but the plot was intense from the very beginning and reached a logical, satisfying conclusion.

A two hour chase, with only the briefest pauses for plot and dialogue. Aside from those last two minor elements (which were fine), it was astonishingly well made and incredibly fun to watch.

Which sounds like it would suck, but is in reality excellent! What a fun, exciting film. This film is smart and delivers wonderfully as a spy thriller.

I really enjoyed this. The film boiled everything down to just the raw confusion of “information” and “assets” moving through time and space. But there was shockingly little time, and space was flattened to an incomprehensible, single plane. There was one moment where Bourne appears in New York seemingly five minutes after leaving Algeria where I got irritated and thought “gosh, did they screw something up in continuity?” and then decided that no, impossible movements are the stuff of this film. Just like the logistics of the violence and chases, so difficult to follow yet more affecting than the hyper-violence of films from the nineties. I decided that this wasn’t just insane handheld camerawork (again I got irritated at one point where the camera work was so shaky I felt sick and thought for a moment that this was just sloppy) and ridiculously hyper editing such as are in fashion these days. Instead, it seems something more interesting is going on, and I think a lot of reviewers have picked up on it, even if it isn’t really so innovative as some seem to say. Perhaps just more noteworthy in a summer blockbuster where nobody was expecting much. In the chases there was very little sense of paths followed, no real pursuers or pursued, just a mayhem of preternatural acuity and movement propelling each individual toward annihilation. There’s really no plot here, instead the film transmits a fairly direct message about the desecration of individual humanity.

I love it when an action film takes chances with the style of shooting and editing and doesn’t condescend to the audience. With The Bourne Ultimatum Paul Greengrass creates a film that is stylish and fun with a breathtaking pace. While Greengrass received a lot of attention for United 93, the constraints of the events and the memories of September 11 made the film a strange mixture with many different forces acting both within and outside of he film. Freed of those constraints with The Bourne Supremacy and now The Bourne Ultimatum he creates intelligent action films that push the limits of the audience with hand-held camera, rapid cutting, and information delivered quickly and subtly. The brutal pacing and editing of some of the sequences in Supremacy gave people a headache and I loved them because they pushed things so far. In Ultimatum Greengrass gets the balance just right and gives the audience a bit more time to breathe, while still creating amazing sequences that built suspense with careful blocking, shooting and editing without resorting to bigger and bigger explosions.
While it’s technically a superb film, it also has some great performances with Matt Damon as the memory-deprived hero, Joan Allen as a CIA boss and an amazing performance from David Strathairn that was almost of exciting as the action sequences. This is what an action film should be – fun, intelligent and exciting.