Movie review - "The Bourne Ultimatum" (2007) ***1/2 (warning: spoilers)

Because this was going to be the entry where we discover the truth about Jason Bourne it was set up to be a rare third-one-in-the-series which was as good as the other two, and further re-assurance was provided by the return of Tony Gilroy and Paul Greengrass.
Certainly much of it is excellent, particularly two massive action set pieces: a chase through Waterloo Station and a similar one through the streets of Tangier (this features some "jumping through window" stunts which are literally breathtaking). But some of the script is annoyingly loose or undeveloped, as if they had to rush it through to make a shoot date: why have a scene with Bourne and his dead girlfriend's brother which doesn't pay off? (You could have used it that the brother tells Bourne about the newspaper article instead of him just having read it). Its far too much of a coincidence to have Julia Stiles just rock up (they could have taken the sting out of it - she could have told the Madrid CIA guy about Bourne, which prompted him to talk to the journalist - as it is the Madrid CIA guy's motivation is never discussed and Stiles comes across as a coincidence). While David Straithairn adds authority as a baddie, Scott Glenn has probably been in this sort of movie one too many times and Albert Finney's last minute appearance would have been a bit more exciting had we not already had a similar turn from him in "Oceans 12".
The film misses emotional opportunities wholesale, with a promising Stiles-Bourne plot only hinted at and Bourne not really doing anything much with the discovery of his real identity (he finds out he volunteered... that's it??? How about finding out about his family, more about his past, etc.) The dialogue has too many "we have a situation"s.
And the ending with it-all-hits-the-media-and-congressional-hearings-result struck as false because that never happens in real life and one of the best things about the Bourne films was they seemed more realistic than other action movies (at times the action here approaches cartoony levels, too, with Bourne just knocking out most of the people out to get him and only killing them if they're really, really bad, and Bourne surviving falling off the top of a building in a car without barely a scratch - and an assassin surviving a head-on collision in a sequence which is a bit too similar to the one in Bourne Supremacy. And how does he get into the CIA office anyway?).
So you start to pick - I totally believed the first two because they were sort of rogue operations but surely no way is the CIA this efficient ("I want X men on the ground, I want the whole system shut down") - although maybe this is why they can't find Osama Bin Laden, they spend all their time hunting down rogue operatives. And the thing with the structure of the film in relation to the timing of the second film is really clever.