The Bourne Ultimatum —- Paul Greengrass, Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi

I can’t remember Jason Bourne’s real name. Something Webb… ah, David Webb. The filmmakers seem to think it’s important that Bourne learns and remembers this, but the revelations at the end of the movie feel rushed and unsatisfying. Maybe that’s on purpose, though. If you spent three movies trying to discover who you really are and you finally discover that you’re a psycho who volunteered to be one of these sad brainwashed CIA assassins, you’d probably be more disappointed and depressed than enlightened. That’s just how Bourne seems at the end, disappointed and depressed and weary. When he’s finally caught by another “asset” and about to be killed, he sighs and says, “Look what they make you give.” This part of the movie is very good.

The rest of it, not so much. In fact, a lot of the rest of the movie is a lame, disappointing cop-out. It didn’t have to be. Look at Shooter: that’s a brutal, cynical, pessimistic movie with just about the most cynical and pessimistic ending it could have. And it fakes you out twice with the expected reassuring heroic ending before it punches you in the gut. It’s honest. Movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, with their reassuring finales in which the heroes reveal the big bad government conspiracy to the world and the government bad apples are defeated and the world is saved for freedom or whatever, are dishonest, or unforgivably naïve.

I wanted The Bourne Ultimatum to be honest in the end. The Bourne Identity was, but I suppose I knew it wouldn’t end well as soon as Pam Landy showed up in The Bourne Supremacy. I don’t know what her position in the CIA is —- she has person one-on-one meetings with the director of the entire CIA, so she’s obviously a high-ranking officer or whatever. How did she get so high in the CIA hierarchy when she’s so dumb? I realize the filmmakers don’t think she is dumb. When they make her say toward the end of this movie that brainwashing and training super-assassins to murder for the State —- even murder U.S. citizens! —- is “not us,” not the CIA, not the United States, they think they have made her say something true. No, my friends, that shit is what the CIA other agencies of the United States do even in real life, except in real life it involves fewer sexy super-assassins played by Matt Damon. A little later in the movie, after Landy has faxed the secret scandalous CIA documents about the super-assassin program to somebody (we never learn who), she smirks at the main CIA bad guy and tells him he’d better start looking for a good lawyer. Yeah, like he doesn’t already have a great lawyer. This bad guy is even more powerful in the CIA than Landy —- oh, his name is all over a secret scandalous document about CIA super-assassins? Oh, that document is a forgery invented by terrorists, and the CIA only uses its super-assassins to kill terrorists and other evil-doers who hate freedom. If the CIA even has super-assassins, which we can’t tell you because of national security. Also, did you know that Pam Landy is a French transvestite lesbian who immigrated illegally from Mexico and wears a burkha and is plotting to blow up and eat American children? Seriously. Come one, Landy, haven’t you heard of Valerie Plame?

Pam Landy is the only official or agent of the U.S. government in the Bourne movies who isn’t directly involved in some way in the super-assassin program. A couple other people from the CIA eventually decide they feel bad about it and try to help Bourne and Landy shut down the program and bring the bad guys to justice, but for the most part everybody in the movies who works for the CIA is either an irredeemably evil villain or a nonentity who sits in front of a computer all day spying on everybody in the universe and thinking nothing of it. Not even bleeding heart Pam Landy seems to have a problem with the fantastic and blatantly illegal (well, formerly blatantly illegal) surveillance technologies employed by the CIA.

And yet the filmmakers think they ought to end the trilogy by reassuring us that if we just get rid of the few bad apples then the good apples like Pam Landy can get back to protecting freedom and democracy and liberty. I suppose the joke is on me for taking these movies seriously. It was clear from the reactions of the audience when I saw the movie that most of them were in it solely for the thrill of watching Matt Damon kill people like a bad-ass.