I fully enjoyed the first two Bourne movies but, for whatever reason, they left scant impression on me. If you'd asked me about good action films of the past five years, there's a decent chance I wouldn't have thought of them without prodding. It may be in part that the ridiculous overkill that mars so many blockbusters--the jetliners crashing in midair, the heroes leaping off skyscrapers or shooting off thousands of rounds in slow-motion--simultaneously makes them more memorable than more realistic, low-key fare such as the Bourne films. Whatever the reason, I doubt I'll have much trouble remembering the third installment in the franchise, The Bourne Ultimatum, which for me was by far the best. Some of the reasons are technical. Paul Greengrass's direction is masterful, alternating subtle, dramatic scenes with bursts of furious activity. I'm not sure I've ever seen an action film with so many moments of utter quiet--a man's face artfully shot over the shoulder of his partner in conversation, a hand reaching slowly for a coffee cup--and they give the film a stateliness rare in the genre. At the same time, the action sequences are marvels of kinetic craftsmanship. A nail-biting pursuit across the rooftops of Tangier culminates in a fistfight of ruthless, unglamorized intensity; a car chase of crunching, crashing velocity ends with Bourne driving his vehicle off a roof backwards. (It's less goofy than it sounds.) As Jason Bourne, Matt Damon has an ease and quiet charisma that I don't recall from the earlier films. True stardom has come slowly to him, but it has arrived. It certainly doesn't hurt that he's again surrounded by an exceptional supporting cast--Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney. And while there's not a great deal to the plot--it's essentially the conclusion of Bourne's years-long effort to discover his true identity--overall, this is a good thing. Thanks to the lack of lengthy exposition and out-of-left-field twists, the movie clocks in at a satisfyingly lean hour and 51 minutes. But I think it is context as much as content that makes The Bourne Ultimatum so much more compelling than its predecessors. A story about an intelligence agency out of control, about illegal surveillance and extreme countermeasures, has far greater resonance today than even a few years ago. Greengrass (who also directed the earnest, understated 9/11 film United 93) clearly gets this and sprinkles the film with contemporary allusions--to rendition, to sleep deprivation, to an agency no longer bound by "red tape." Contemporary political debate is echoed in the words of competing spymasters Strathairn ("It ends when we've won") and Allen ("This isn't us"), and while Greengrass makes his own preferences clear enough he generally leaves them in the background. The movie may have an implicit ideology, but it's a topical fantasy rather than a political polemic, more Three Days of the Condor than Syriana. Toward the end, the message creeps toward the foreground: When Bourne is told "You can't outrun what you did" and "You chose right here to be Jason Bourne," the allegorical indictment of the United States is pretty clear. But those who'd rather maintain a little distance between their summer entertainments and their geopolitics--as well as any hoping for a fourth installment of the franchise--will be glad to hear that, after a brief tease, Greengrass concludes the film not on a note of moral rebuke, but on one of commercial satisfaction. He earned it. --Christopher Orr