What must it be like to be a bit of cyber-data swimming through streams of information? Such a question points toward the mind of William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic," the computer-world of the Disney movie "Tron" and, of course, Philip K. Dick's eternally relevant "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", reimagined by Ridley Scott as "Blade Runner."
We don't have the time and space to dive into those dark waters, but such hi-tech metaphysics do come to mind while watching Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a spook in dogged search of his soul through three movies - "The Bourne Identity," "The Bourne Supremacy" and now "The Bourne Ultimatum" - each film upping the pulse-pounding velocity of this human search engine's passage.
In "Ultimatum," as it's designed and activated, reality's reduced to endless grids of information, accreted by computers, cameras, telephones, bugs, human spies - and survival depends on how fast and smart you process fast-breaking information. The momentum never flags.
In some ways, "The Bourne Ultimatum" moves like a super, mile-a-minute videogame, where we spy over the shoulders of the CIA and its nefarious secret wings, as they try to get a cursor on "where in the world is Jason Bourne?" The film's nonstop scrabbling for intel echoes director Paul Greengrass' style in "United 93," where so many people in the dark on 9/11 tried desperately to nail down what was happening before it was too late.
Greengrass makes us part of the CIA's hi-tech war room where the bad guys (David Strathairn, at his slimiest) - and ballsy Pamela Hendry (Joan Allen, superb) - try to interpret data at warp speed so as to track down elusive Bourne and assorted other "assets" and "targets."
But in "Ultimatum," we're not just watchers, we're also breathlessly abroad with Bourne in train stations, skyscraper stairwells, shabby hotel rooms and hole-in-the-wall offices - and in the busy streets of Turin, Paris, London, Madrid, Tangier and New York. Sometimes we find ourselves in the stuttering computer of Bourne's memory, as it calls up tantalizing flashes of his past - but mostly we're running endlessly to stay alive with the man who's finally heading home, the very bad place where he was first "Bourne."
At the beginning of "The Bourne Identity," our amnesiac assassin rose from the storm-tossed Mediterranean. In "Supremacy," his headshot lover drifted away from him until she became just a shadow in the cloudy waters of an Indian river - leaving him to once more reboot into his lonely quest for who/what he is. But it's not just the liquid medium of oceans and rivers and half-memories which threaten to overwhelm Jason Bourne. His fate seems to lie in the hands of black-ops spooks, masters of erasing and exploiting those data-streams that comprise reality and identity. (An assassin flips open his phone to eyeball a text message innocuously headed "incoming tasking." The task is his next assigned murder.)
At the end of "The Bourne Supremacy," Jason was risking his life to let a young woman know that her parents' death wasn't a murder-suicide, as she had believed, but executions at his own hands. "Ultimatum" opens in fast-motion, as the wounded penitent flees Russian cops and demonstrates for the first time his refusal to kill except in self-defense. Meanwhile, a London reporter (Paddy Considine) and a defecting CIA agent (Colin Stinton) meet to exchange information about "Blackbriar," a deep-cover operation launched by a behavior-modifying shrink (Albert Finney), the monster who made the Bourne killing machine. The plotlines are in play; the rest is top-speed trajectory, intersection and collision.
Damon has grown heavier, harder since the "Bourne" franchise began; his face is lined and empty, energized only by staying ahead of the curve. All boyishness has been scoured away; you never doubt for a moment that this is a competent strategist and killer. The emotional chink in Bourne's armor that allowed him to fall in love in the first film can only be accessed in memory. The eyes - windows to the soul - are dead.
When he wonders why Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the CIA operative who set him up in "Supremacy," is helping him now, she answers - with a weirdly flat affect: "You were ... hard for me." That's what passes for a declaration of love in these killer environs, and Jason processes the information as dispassionately as he does any of the film's many other coded communications. A speeding bullet train, Bourne's programmed for a single destination, sans detours.
Indeed, the whole movie is like a sleek, accelerating bullet train - that sometimes morphs into cars careening through crowded streets, colliding in such gorgeously choreographed, in-your-face mayhem, shards of red brake lights explode dangerously near your eyes. And sometimes the train morphs into human beings in frenetic motion, two in separate, relentless pursuit of another through packed Tangier streets, alleys, stairwells, living rooms, from roof to roof and window to window - until the ratcheted-up tension and adrenalin of the chase explodes in brutal, claustrophobic violence.
Greengrass doesn't shoot fast and loose, cutting madly in mindless MTV style. He's the antithesis of big-budget, action-movie helmers who simply flail indiscriminately about, the cinematic equivalents of a toddler throwing his blocks thither and yon (see especially Michael Bay's "The Transformers"). A director who respects the logic of space and motion, Greengrass demands that you pay attention, that you catch bits of data as they fly purposefully by, that you bring intelligence to the ultrakinetic reality of this precision-built action movie.
It ain't Shakespeare, but neither can "The Bourne Ultimatum" be written off as a dazzling rollercoaster ride built to deliver thrills and nothing more. Too many disquieting moments make you wonder how much of your own identity could slip and slide away into intel-hungry cyberspace. Could you, like Jason Bourne, be "disappeared" down the data-drain? Would that be a hi-tech version of "rendition"?
Kathleen Murphy is a freelance writer living on Queen Anne.
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