The Bourne Ultimatum opens with its hero already wounded. Jason Bourne, evading Moscow police, is not looking for a fight. He is looking for a name. That is the engine Paul Greengrass built in 2007, and it still runs cleaner than almost any action film released since.
The third Bourne film, written by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, is a chase picture that never pretends to be anything else. Matt Damon plays Bourne as a man who has stopped asking whether he wants the truth. He only asks how far he has to run to reach it.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
Simon Ross and the Column That Killed Him
The plot turns on a journalist. Paddy Considine plays Simon Ross of The Guardian, who is writing a column about Bourne and has stumbled onto Operation Blackbriar, the program that succeeded Treadstone. Ross learns the name and says it out loud on a phone call to his editor. That is enough. The CIA’s ECHELON system catches the word, and the hunt begins.
Bourne has been reading Ross’s articles. After telling Marie’s brother, Martin Kreutz, about her assassination in India, he arranges to meet Ross at London Waterloo station. He sees the CIA closing in before Ross does and tries to pull him out. Ross panics and runs. Paz, a Blackbriar assassin, shoots him dead on the orders of Deputy Director Noah Vosen.
It is a brutal, efficient sequence, and it sets the film’s terms. Anyone who gets near Bourne dies. The reporter is not a hero here, just a man who knew one word too many.
Noah Vosen Sits Behind the Screens
David Strathairn plays Vosen as a bureaucrat with a kill list. He is not a Bond villain and he does not gloat. He sits in a room with screens, gives orders, and treats the law as an obstacle to route around. Strathairn makes him small and precise, which is far more frightening than a monologue.
Scott Glenn is CIA Director Ezra Kramer. Joan Allen returns as Pamela Landy, the deputy director who is pulled into Vosen’s operation and told to assist. She does, reluctantly. Then she fiercely disagrees.
The film’s best running tension is not Bourne versus Vosen. It is Landy versus Vosen, two professionals in the same building who disagree about what the operation should be allowed to do. Landy’s refusal is the spine of the back half.
Madrid, Tangier, and Nicky Parsons
Vosen’s team analyzes Ross’s notes and identifies his source as Neal Daniels, a CIA station chief in Madrid, played by Colin Stinton. Bourne reaches Daniels’s office first. He dispatches Vosen’s agents and finds Nicky Parsons, a former Treadstone operative he has met before. Julia Stiles plays her with a held breath — she knows more than she says, and she says it anyway.
Nicky tells Bourne that Daniels has fled to Tangier and helps him escape an arriving CIA unit. There is a hint of something romantic between them from before his amnesia. The film does not explain it. It does not need to.
Vosen notices that Nicky accessed information about Daniels. He suspects she is working with Bourne and orders the Blackbriar asset Desh Bouksani to kill them both. Landy fiercely disagrees with the order. Joey Ansah plays Desh, and the Tangier sequence that follows — Bourne chasing Desh to stop him from reaching Daniels — is the film’s high point. Bourne fails to prevent Daniels’ assassination.
The Magazine, the Towel, the Chair
Greengrass shoots action close and handheld, and the editing is fast enough to feel like panic rather than choreography. The Waterloo station sequence, the Madrid office fight, and the Tangier chase all share the same logic: they are staged for speed, not for show.
There is no gadgetry. Bourne uses whatever is at hand. The film treats violence as a skill he cannot turn off rather than a power he enjoys.
The cast list is deep and mostly used well. Albert Finney appears as Dr. Albert Hirsch. Edgar Ramírez, Tom Gallop, Corey Johnson and Daniel Brühl fill out the operation. None of them get much screen time. All of them register.
What Bourne Agreed To
Gilroy, who wrote the previous two films, wanted to explore Bourne seeking redemption for his murders. That is the part of The Bourne Ultimatum that has aged best. The film is not about stopping Blackbriar. It is about Bourne finding out what he agreed to and deciding what to do with the answer.
Bourne deals with more flashbacks of when he first joined Treadstone, seemingly of him being forced to comply with the program. The film withholds the full picture until the end.
The tagline is “Remember everything. Forgive nothing.” The film’s actual argument is subtler. Bourne remembers, and then he chooses. That is a more interesting movie than the tagline sells.
Where It Sits in the Series
Ranking the original Bourne trilogy is not hard, but it is worth doing plainly:
- The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) — the tightest of the three, and the one with the clearest purpose.
- The Bourne Identity — the origin, and the one that introduced the amnesia hook.
- The Bourne Supremacy (2004) — the bridge, and the one Gilroy felt was missing Bourne’s redemption arc.
That order is not a knock on Supremacy. It is a measure of how much Ultimatum gains from having a target that is not just survival.
The film premiered at ArcLight Hollywood on July 25, 2007, and Universal Pictures released it in the United States on August 3. It grossed $444 million worldwide and won three Academy Awards. Principal photography began in New York City on October 2, 2006, with visual effects by Double Negative.
The sequels came without the same charge. The Bourne Legacy arrived in 2012 without Damon or Greengrass. A sequel to Ultimatum, titled simply Jason Bourne, followed, with Damon returning. Neither is what this one is.
The Bourne Ultimatum runs 115 minutes and does not waste ten of them. Greengrass and his writers understood that the franchise’s real subject was never espionage. It was a man trying to find out whether he is the person the file says he is.
The film’s weakness is that its villains are procedural rather than personal. Vosen is a function, not a character with a history, and the film never gives Strathairn a scene that explains why he believes what he believes. He is the system, and the system does not need a motive.
That is a real limitation. It is also the point. Blackbriar is not one bad man. It is a program, and the film is smart enough to know that removing one official would not end it.
What holds up is the craft. The Tangier chase, the Waterloo sequence, and the Madrid fight are still better staged than most of what the genre produces now. Greengrass shoots chaos without losing geography, which is harder than it looks and rarer than it should be.
Damon’s performance is the quietest thing in the film. He does not need much dialogue. Bourne’s face does the work.
The film’s final movement — Bourne uncovering his dark past — is the payoff the trilogy earned. It is not a happy ending. It is a decision.
Supremacy was a good film with a muddled purpose. Ultimatum fixed that by giving Bourne something to want besides the next border. That is why it remains the best of the three, and why it still plays as a model for how to end a franchise without inflating it.
The action is not the reason to watch it again. The action is the delivery system. The reason is a man who spent three films running from a memory and finally turns around to look at it.
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