Frantic. Frenzy. Breathless. Bourne Ultimatum.

Free falling objects tend to have pitch, yaw, roll. Bourne Ultimatum is one such piece of film with its pictures moving in all three dimensions at such breathless speeds that they might break free out of the projector running off in a thousand directions. Here’s when they almost did –

• When Bourne swerves left on the steering wheel when his cop car is being scraped across a median.
• When Bourne jumps across the last roof, shown in slo-mo not super slo-mo, to crash across into the window in the opposite building.
• “He just drove off the roof!”
• The entire Simon Ross episode.

And here’s when they did –

• Julia Stiles breaks into a smile. And the soundtrack kicks in to a shot of Jason Bourne… in fact, the whole epilogue was great.

Bourne Identity would still be held highest of the Bourne series because it has a high book-to-screen-ness quotient and the story stands good on its own. One the other hand, Bourne Ultimatum is one book-to-screen adaptation where there is absolutely no relation between the book and screen. And the screen doesn’t even inch towards a semblance of a story what with all the action taking the place of the story. But who cares? When the action is this mindblowing.

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