Bourne Kicks Major Behind

Summers are known for sequels, and this summer has been one of threequels -- Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

Some are good and others are really, really bad. The Bourne Ultimatum just happens to be really, really good.

Again, we follow reluctant government assassin Jason Bourne as he tries to remember his past. This time, he's as close as he's ever been to figuring out the truth.

Played by Matt Damon, Bourne is brutal, jaw-droppingly so at times, but he's also remorseful. He doesn't like killing. He kills because he has to survive.

And ever since The Bourne Identity, he's been wanting to know why he kills and who made him who he is.

As always, there's someone who's chasing him and hoping he'd just die. That someone is Noah Vosen, played by David Straithairn, a CIA big-wig who runs an office in Manhattan. He is cold and calculating and willing to kill anyone to get close enough to Bourne and kill him.

Pamela Landy is the opposite, a hard-edged CIA agent with a moral center, played by Joan Allen. She begins suspecting that Bourne has been done wrong and risks her career to help him.

Under the direction of Paul Greengrass, precious little time is set aside for poignant moments or small talk. But Greengrass manages to imbue Bourne with complexities that make him more human.

Bourne isn't bond. He's a one-woman guy who still mourns the death of his girlfriend in the last film, The Bourne Supremacy. And he's no Arnold Swartznegger-like killing machine.

That doesn't mean no action. Oh, there's action. Hard-hitting, in-your-face action. Greengrass's documentary-style direction puts you in every lip-flesh-chewing action sequence. The car chases are particularly exhilarating, and you feel each smash of car metal as if you were in the back seat.

More importantly, Greengrass gives that hard-to-quantify quality we call soul. This is no simple popcorn movie that you forget once you have left the movie theater.

Bourne is doing, at some level, what all of us are doing: trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in.

Jason Bourne, in the end, is all of us searching for the truth of our lives in a chaotic world.