hollywood hues
Racy entertainer

Ervell E. Menezes finds action in The Bourne Ultimatum a visual treat

Matt Damon in a still from The Bourne Ultimatum

The hired killer Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is still hazy about his past but when he makes news again, thanks to an article in The Guardian, he’s is on the run again. How things he gropes for his original identity is what The Bourne Ultimatum is all about but it is the staccato pace that marks this racy entertainer with our hero outdoing any of the existing one-man armies.

From the opening shot of him jumping off a running train he is on the run whether its outside the crowded Waterloo area in London, the busy streets of Manhattan, driving fast in the streets of Madrid or jumping on the rooftops of Tangier. Smashing through glass and beating his adversaries to pulp Bourne makes James Bond look like a beginner.

Stunningly shot by Oliver Wood, the action zooms from London to Paris, and New York to Tangier till it finally ends in New York but not after a virtual roller-coaster ride for the viewer.

Journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Consedine) sets the ball rolling and then you have the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives. There’s Blackbriar chief Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) and his team and they are joined by Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), who is supposed to be an expert on Bourne, and Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), who has run into him before even if he can’t remember it. There are a number of contacts in this intricate Robert Ludlum plot and scriptwriters Tony Gilroy and others do justice to it. But the razzle-dazzle tempo which director Paul Greengrass infuses the film with doesn’t give the viewer time to think. To say that the action is exaggerated is easily the understatement of the year. But it is visually satiating.

That the CIA is working at cross-purposes is not surprising and therefore run into roadblocks. There’s Paz (Edgar Ramirez) waiting for him in Tangier but he gets help from some unlikely quarters and that enhances the suspense. That he has to find his true self is the bottom line and that’s where Dr Albert Hirsch (Albert Finney) comes in.

Matt Damon is his usual tough indestructible self and of the rest David Straithairn and Joan Allen (who was brilliant in The Crucible) impress. The others, including veterans Albert Finney and Scott Glenn, are academic but even if you haven’t seen the two earlier films The Bourne Ultimatum is surely worth a dekko.

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