An intentional buzz kill, this fight succeeds in bringing you down off the roof, where just moments earlier you had been flying so high with Bourne. (Look at the dude go!) Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there's no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.
But he, along with the writers (here, Tony Gilroy, Scott Burns and George Nolfi), also wants to complicate things, mix some unease in with all the heart-thumping enjoyment. Not because he's a sadist, or at least not entirely, but because the Bourne series is, finally, about consequences, about chickens coming home to roost.
The Bourne Ultimatum drives its points home forcefully, making you jump in your seat and twitch, but it's careful not to leave any bruises. (It's filmmaking with a rubber hose.)
Amid the new and familiar faces (David Strathairn and Joan Allen), it introduces a couple of power-grasping, smooth-talking ghouls and stark reminders of Abu Ghraib that might make you blanch even if you don't throw up. As Bourne has inched closer to solving the rebus of his identity, he hasn't always liked what he's found. He isn't alone. Movies mostly like to play spy games pretty much for kicks, stoking us with easy brutality and cool gadgets that get us high and get us going, whether our gentlemen callers dress in tuxes or track suits.
What's different about the Bourne movies is the degree to which they have been able to replace the pleasures of cinematic violence with those of movie-made kinetics - action, not just blood.
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