As I have stated, Bourne Ultimatum is a disappointment. This movie critic graded it C+:
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'Bourne Ultimatum' is spy trilogy's final, and weakest, link
By WILLIAM ARNOLD
P-I MOVIE CRITIC
The one unequivocally nice thing that can be said about "The Bourne Ultimatum" is that -- even though it's Part 3 of the franchise -- its story doesn't feel like an afterthought. The climax leaves us with a certain satisfied sense of completion.
Moreover, unlike most other movie sequels these days, it doesn't automatically assume we watched the DVD of the last installment the night before. Its opening skillfully reprises the saga, and even gives us a few snippets from its 2002 and 2004 predecessors.
As directed by Paul Greengrass (coming off his Oscar nomination for "United 93"), the movie also tries very hard to be something different in its genre: It's much more stylized than the earlier outings and as esoteric a big action movie as I can remember.
And yet it still manages to be the least of the "Bourne" films, a jumbled shadow of the original. On the heels of "Spider-man 3," "Pirates 3," "Shrek the Third" and "Ocean's 13," it's one more demonstration of the rule that the third episode of a movie cycle is its worst.
With virtually every sequence shot like a battlefield documentary -- from a jerky hand-held camera framed extremely closely -- and edited like an MTV music video, the movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.
The story -- which, like the others, has little in common with its Robert Ludlum novel source other than the title -- has the three-year plight of rogue, amnesiac CIA agent-on-the-run Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) being outed by a British journalist (Paddy Considine).
When he tracks down the reporter to try to find his source -- and thus perhaps discover his true identity -- things go instantly wrong. Soon the London branch of the CIA, led by a Nazi-like superpatriot (David Strathairn), is on his trail with murderous intent.
After that, it's one action sequence and exotic location after another as Bourne -- aided by two women agent holdovers from Part 2 (Julia Stiles and Joan Allen) -- consistently outsmarts his pursuers and finally comes back to the States to solve the mystery of his past.
Like the other "Bournes," this one goes a certain distance on Damon's robotic but strangely compelling presence, and on regular screenwriter Tony Gilroy's gift for spiking the story lines with clever, audience-pleasing plot twists.
But, to my mind, Greengrass' effort to make his film the last word in tightly framed, nervous-camera action scenes is fairly disastrous. Most of the sequences are such a mess that we simply can't tell what's happening in them. The cumulative effect is boredom.
This semidocumentary style -- which tries to put the viewer right in the action, instead of viewing it from outside -- is a recent trend that has been increasingly creeping into Hollywood filmmaking since "Batman Begins" in 2005.
And, used more sparingly, it worked for Greengrass in his earlier films "Bloody Sunday" and especially "United 93," in which the claustrophobic confusion of the visuals eerily re-created the feel of what it must have been like on that ill-fated flight.
But it's not at all suited to an epic action blockbuster. The $100 million spent on "Bourne 3" seems a waste because most of the movie is just a blur on the screen. It cries out for a few long shots to orient us as to what the heck is going on.
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