Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) continues to search for his identity, with help from CIA field agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), in The Bourne Ultimatum.

Jasin Boland Jasin Boland

Jason Bourne brings it all home with a bang, a big bang, in the breathless finale to the Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum. This adrenaline-charged, bullet-riddled sprint from Moscow to New York is the best of the Bourne films, a politically charged actioner with chases, brawls, shootouts and dry wit that never relies on one-liners.

Matt Damon has grown into the role of Bourne, the amnesiac government assassin slowly gathering memories of who he was and how he came to be. The physical demands of the role — a brutal command of the martial arts, a willingness to hurl himself hither and yon, heedless of danger, trained out of any fear, able to act and react — come easily, believably, to an actor who seemed to need a lot more stunt and camera trickery to get through his baby-faced turn in The Bourne Identity, back in 2002.

An A-list cast of character actors, the great director Paul Greengrass, who took time off from spying to make United 93, and editor Christopher Rouse have conjured up the action film of the summer.

Ultimatum picks up the story in Moscow, where Bourne escapes the clutches of the last Treadstone operatives after turning the tables on their leader (Brian Cox). With Cox’s character and (in the first Bourne movie) Chris Cooper’s original “control” dead, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), the CIA section chief on his case, has figured out that the survival move on her part is to not want Bourne dead. She’s sympathetic and wants to bring him in.

But the vast right-wing conspiracy in charge (Scott Glenn heads the CIA, David Strathairn is his new covert killing kingpin) still want the “rogue agent” silenced.

That’s because bits of Bourne’s story are reaching the vigilant British press, in the person of a reporter (Paddy Considine) who is on to Treadstone’s successor codename, Blackbriar. The ability to monitor international cell-phone traffic means the spies are onto the reporter. And Bourne, reading his story in print, is on to him, too. Who will get to the guy first?

The tale races from Paris to London to Turin to Tangier as Bourne pulls in bits of memory about people involved in his ruthless training.

“Will you commit to this program?” comes to him, in the voice of Albert Finney. That’s who he has to find. In between blackouts.

Strathairn, playing Noah Vosen, a not-quite-panicked bureaucrat with blood on his hands, hurls out words we’ve heard on the news to his subordinates — “Rendition.” “Experimental interrogation.” “Imminent threat.” All to do with CIA justifications for illegal actions, and all pertaining to Bourne. He calls in assorted “assets” to snuff him out.

That cute low-level field officer, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles, finally old enough to play this), comes back into the picture. She exchanges a lot of blank-faced but meaningful stares with Bourne, whose memory of losing his German girlfriend in The Bourne Supremacy is still fresh.

A car chase in New York, a motorcycle and foot race in the glorious housing clutter of Tangier, a nervy getaway in London’s Waterloo Station and a hand-to-hand struggle to the death with an assassin all add up to a movie that rarely takes a breather for character. The few slow moments seem trite, by comparison. A visit to the brother of the dead girlfriend, Stiles’ stone-faced flirtation, all unmoving. Strathairn and Allen bicker in front of subordinates like an old married couple, complete with CIA acronyms and spy-craft jargon.

All the while, their smart bomb who has wandered off-target is recovering memories and questioning the morality of all this following orders, all this violence.

The Bourne movies rarely waste a moment showing how Bourne gets from place to place, with a new passport, money, a new gun and a plan. He just does.

The way Greengrass, Damon, cinematographer Oliver Wood, editor Rouse and composer John Powell package these movies’ chases should be in film-school textbooks: Shoot the hurried Damon with a hand-held camera, fairly tight so that it jostles and jumps as he stride-sprints. Cut to extreme close-ups of Bourne, a villains’ neck, a gun being assembled, the door of a Ford Expedition, a locale, all in a seizure-inducing blur. Add a pulsing, Hitchcockian score, and every Bourne rushes past in a flurry of images, impressions of people, places, incidents, all creating a feeling that time is running out.

Which it is. But this conclusion to Bourne’s odyssey assures us that while his trilogy may be over, spy movies will never be the same. Bourne, ultimately, has reinvented them.