Hancock

Wanted

The Love Guru

Get Smart

The Incredible Hulk

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Sex and the City

Savage Grace

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Surfwise

What Happens in Vegas

Iron Man

Son of Rambow

Bourne (Matt Damon) wins the confidence
of CIA agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles).

The Bourne Ultimatum is not only the best Bourne movie yet, it is the most satisfying sequel in a summer suffering from acute sequelitis. Sleek, smart and relentless, it's pretty much 114 minutes of breakneck action featuring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne -- the brooding, haunted Hamlet of secret agents -- chasing the secrets of his own identity all over Moscow, London, Paris, Tangiers, Morocco, Madrid and New York.

Few screen characters have unleashed so much enjoyable white-knuckle mayhem while simply trying to get straight answers to the questions, "Who am I" and "Who made me this way?" Bourne's a Scud missile suffering an existential crisis, and it's the spy's angst and bafflement that give these movies such a potent extra kick alongside the brute fun of watching Damon outrun, out-muscle and out-punch the shooting gallery of emotionless assassins sent by the CIA, whom he always manages to out-maneuver.

Bourne evades capture in London's
underground.

By now, Damon -- using a deeper vocal register than usual and looking frenzied -- owns his role. The actor's spooked, wary, tightly wound vibe signals that under Bourne's lightning reflexes, trippy flashbacks of his CIA brainwashing and uncanny ability to survive bombings, car crashes and near drowning, is a guy running, jumping and catapulting through a private hell.

Paul Greengrass directs this apparently final film of the series expertly, despite relying on the jacked-up shaky-cam that also marred his The Bourne Supremacy. Our super-spy hero's miseries are aided and abetted by David Strathairn as a ruthless black ops type who'd be right at home in present-day Washington, by behavior modification crackpot Albert Finney and by CIA investigator Joan Allen who finally feels for the plight of the renegade secret agent. Julia Stiles also returns as a sort-of old flame, but who's got time for romance when the action's steadily ratcheting up to a heart-in-mouth conclusion as Bourne finally faces the truth about himself? The movie stays so on target and is so shrewd in skewering the insanity of contemporary geopolitics that it's high time to call the Bourne franchise for what it is -- the one truly great spy adventure series since James Bond.

Bourne comes face to face with CIA
investigator Pamela Landy (Joan Allen)
in New York.

By Stephen Rebello

photo credit: Jasin Boland/©2007 Universal Studios. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.