The Bourne Ultimatum: Three-Fourths Buckwheat

Ann and I went to The Bourne Ultimatum expecting it to be as good as its two predecessors. The first had been a good, solid spy movie, while the Bourne Supremacy had ratcheted up the adrenaline level, the exotic locations, and the stakes.Unfortunately, The Bourne Ultimatum dispenses with showing us the how--how Jason Bourne can so easily slip between countries, how he can get into a CIA building in a plausible manner, how he manages to survive multiple car wrecks. In addition, The Bourne Ultimatum features Villains Behaving Stupidly and Victims Behaving Stupidly. When the CIA's number one man in Spain goes on the run...he uses his own passport to travel to Tunisia. For example.The set pieces are often still amazing--the director, who also did United 93, is an artist--but sometimes overlong, and pointless. When Bourne stages an elaborate ruse in a London subway station in order to talk to a journalist who has information, you wonder why. The cell phone slipped into the man's pocket during this escapade could as easily have been slipped into his pocket without telling him to come to the station. Bourne could have just talked to him by phone somehow. And, finally, the Silence of the Bourne, which spoke to character in prior films, here just makes you long for something more.In short, on our buckwheat scale--"buckwheat" being a mob reference in Things to Do In Denver When You're Dead to shooting someone up the ass and letting them die slowly--The Bourne Ultimatum is about three-fourths buckwheat.