Rewind – 2007 in Film: The Bourne Ultimatum

There’s an exact moment, about 20 minutes in, when you realize The Bourne Ultimatum is a great movie. And it involves Matt Damon yelling at someone to tie their shoe. As far as qualitatively soul-baring movie moments go, it’s an unlikely one. But the best movies—the ones that elevate and evolve their genres—always have little details like this. Fleeting moments that linger in your head far longer than it seems they ought to. This particular moment has stayed with me for 12 years. Partially because neither of the shoes belonging to the man Matt Damon was yelling at were actually untied.

Here’s the set-up: A British journalist named Simon Ross is investigating Blackbriar, the top-secret government program that birthed Jason Bourne. Ross has unknowingly put his own life in danger because his news coverage is proving to be far too revealing for the CIA’s liking. Bourne, who is also trying to find out the truth about Blackbriar, makes contact with Ross at London’s impossibly crowded Waterloo Station. Hoping to find out who his source is, but the CIA arrive at the same time to apprehend Ross.

“There’s an exact moment, about 20 minutes in, when you realize The Bourne Ultimatum is a great movie.”

Bourne needs to confirm who among the crowd are actually agents watching Ross. So he shouts into his cell phone, “Tie your shoe! Tie your shoe right now!” And as Ross bends over in a panic, we see Bourne identify exactly which heads in the crowd quickly swivel around searching for their mark.

Why is this such a great moment? Spy movies have always been incredibly reactionary, not just to global politics, but also to each other. The original Bourne Trilogy (of which The Bourne Ultimatum is the concluding chapter) was just as much of a pivot away from Brosnan-era James Bond movies as it was a pivot into Bush-Era, shit-just-got-real paranoia.

To put it simply, the good guys in Bond movies could usually afford to make mistakes. Bond himself got captured all the time. (You can’t escape an absurd death trap if you’re not first placed into one.) But things were different in the Bourne movies. It wasn’t just wrong strategies that could get you killed, but wrong moments. Each split-second necessitated the exact right action or you were dead.

Bourne tersely telling Simon Ross to quickly drop down and tie his already tied shoe underscored the level of constant danger the world felt in the waning years of the Bush Era. And the bullet that blows out the back of Ross’s skull less than five minutes later drove the point home.

“Spy movies have always been incredibly reactionary, not just to global politics, but also to each other.”

Howard Hawkes once (allegedly) said that “a good movie is three good scenes and no bad ones.” And The Bourne Ultimatum is one of the perfect examples of this theory. Toward the middle of the movie, we get Great Scene #2. As Bourne and another CIA assassin named Desh fight to the death in a cramped apartment in Tangiers.

In the wake of The Matrix eight years prior, movie fight scenes had seemingly all become elaborate feats of physics-defying choreography and acrobatics. The visual poetry and fluidity of movement in these scenes was far more important than any realism or intensity. Just one year earlier, James Bond had a parkour fight on a crane. That’s not a complaint; Casino Royale is a great movie. And was itself an effort to bring the Bond franchise closer to what audiences were responding to in the Bourne films. But there’s no question that movie fight scenes had been getting progressively further away from reality for nearly a decade.

Bourne’s fight with Desh is the exact moment that era ended, and a new one began. (The naked sauna knife fight in Eastern Promises was unleashed just a few months later.) This fight is brutal. Few individual moves can be made out during the fight. The editing and handheld camerawork move like machine gun fire. The fight lasts 103 seconds and has, by my best count, somewhere around 120 cuts. Meaning the average shot during this fight lasts a little over 8/10 of a second.

“The lack of any flashy kill-move, and the absence of any film score during the fight, all have the cumulative effect of removing the audience from the realization that they’re watching a movie.”

The added combination of the claustrophobic apartment the scene takes place in (about as non-set-piece-y as an action location could ever be), the lack of any flashy kill-move, and the absence of any film score during the fight, all have the cumulative effect of removing the audience from the realization that they’re watching a movie.

That, by the way, is what director Paul Greengrass excels at. The year before, Greengrass directed United 93, the story of the lone flight hijacked on 9/11 that didn’t reach its intended target. It’s unlikely there’s any other narrative movie in film history that feels more like a documentary than United 93 does. It may seem odd that Greengrass would make something like United 93 between two Bourne movies.

But Greengrass treated the Bourne material like it was just as much of a realistic portrayal of the threats facing America as anything in the historical record. That’s where the urgency of his Bourne films comes from. Yes, Greengrass is a filmmaker defined by the urgency of his style. But he’s also drawn to material that merits that treatment.

Greengrass took over the franchise after Doug Liman directed the first film in the trilogy, The Bourne Identity. Liman, who also directed Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Edge of Tomorrow, among others, is a fun action director, and The Bourne Identity is a fun action movie. But there’s also never any question what you’re watching with a Doug Liman movie: you are watching entertainment.

“With Greengrass’s Bourne movies, you aren’t there to be entertained, you’re there to be terrified at what our government is capable of.”

From the moment Greengrass took over with 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, the movies feel different (and a shocking early death confirms the validity of that heightened dread). With Greengrass’s Bourne movies, you aren’t there to be entertained, you’re there to be terrified at what our government is capable of.

In The Bourne Ultimatum, that terrifying government capability comes in the form of Noah Vosen—memorably played by David Strathairn—the man charged with protecting the CIA’s black ops secrets. That brings us to Great Scene #3. And the moment where you feel the Bourne movies are in closest communication with their James Bond forebears.

Bourne has led Vosen to believe that he’s meeting someone across the city, so Vosen and his whole team mobilize there. But what Bourne really wanted was to get everyone out of Vosen’s office so he could break in and steal the files from Vosen’s safe. From the office, Bourne calls Vosen so he can record his voice and get through the safe’s voice ID security. The phone call should have ended there, but instead this is the one moment where a Greengrass Bourne film breaks character. Here’s what happens:

That’s the only moment in a Greengrass Bourne film where Bourne willingly puts himself in danger for the sake of the witty comeback. Which, of course, was a hallmark of nearly every James Bond film.

“The Bourne Ultimatum gloriously defied spy-movie and action-movie expectations.”

Was it worth it? Was it worth the movie and the character reneging on their own established code for the sake of one really fucking cool moment? Yes. Yes it was. Because right after Bourne hangs up the phone, the camera cuts back to David Strathairn as Noah Vosen, and he gives one of the great momentary facial expressions in recent cinema history. (Check it out at the 48-second mark of the clip.) His upper lip curls up in this perfect way where you can tell a man who has been trained all his life not to show emotion is, nonetheless, absolutely seething.

But that’s it. That’s the moment. That’s the payoff. Unlike how it would go in a Bond movie, Bourne and Vosen never meet, and they never even speak again. (Vosen does later try to shoot Bourne in the back, but Bourne wasn’t aware Vosen was even there.) Bourne’s plotline in the film is resolved in a scene with a secondary antagonist, and Vosen’s plotline in the film is resolved with a secondary protagonist. The Bourne Ultimatum gloriously defied spy-movie and action-movie expectations at all times, except for one moment where, even more gloriously, it didn’t.