Bourne Watch: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Tickets are already purchased for Jason Bourne for next Sunday, and so it was time to wrap up the original trilogy here at home. Eventually I'll make time for the Jeremy Renner Bourne movie, but... anyway.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) wraps up the storyline started in the first movie, answering the questions of "who is Jason Bourne?" and gives Pam Landy a conclusion to her arc as the non-compromised CIA agent trying to do right within the agency.

It has some incredible car chases and whatnot, and I highly recommend it if you've seen the first two and want more of same, but it's not like it's an incredible story on its own. It does feature Albert Finney and David Strathairn with about 30 seconds of Scott Glenn.


Of course we have back Julia Stiles as Nicky (poor, poor Nicky), and Matt Damon in the titular role.

The movie is a movie about the large, phenomenal action sequences like the rooftop chase in Turin (that was Turin, right?) that informed more or less every action movie which came afterward, especially the new James Bond movies.  If I liked Paul Greengrass' direction in Bourne Supremacy, I feel like he got it down to a science here.  Take the complicated sequence in Heathrow where Bourne leads a reporter around the landscape via cell phone, or the car chase in Manhattan.  Just amazing work.

This isn't the most complicated movie in the world, but it works as a thriller, and, really, a very long thriller if you just watch all three of these movies back to back.

And, as I have little else to say, the movie also has Joan Allen in a series of functional workplace outfits and the best use of turtlenecks I can think of in recent filmdom.

a blazer for that "I'm going to see the suits" look

for functional wear in the ready-room, why not a turtleneck?

For full David Straithorn disapproval, switch to a gray turtleneck

out meeting the possibly crazy, rogue CIA agent?  Add a scarf for something fun!