As it happens, I had bought Ludlum’s book The Bourne Ultimatum in paperback a few weeks ago and read it. I thought the writing was pretty bad, too much philosophic yapping between the characters (“Boy, we’re getting old.” “Yes, when this series began we were 15 years younger.” “And I lost a leg in book 3.” “And Bourne’s not 30 years old any more.” “Yes, and I’m hobbling about because of the leg I lost.” “Gosh, Bourne hasn’t lost much speed... yet.”) I actually went back to my copy of the first book, The Bourne Identity, to see if the writing was as bad back then. It wasn’t. I have at least one other Ludlum, and I have never felt his writing was great, but this one is a lot worse.

Fortunately (yes, I repeat myself), the movie and the book have almost nothing in common except superspy Jason Bourne. The writing is better — sometimes it’s good you can’t put 100,000 words of text into a movie. It’s non-stop, hyperkinetic action. Bourne calmly makes mincemeat of an almost endless series of bad guys. The wavy camera work annoyed me for the first half-hour (for crying out loud, when someone’s sitting at their office desk, you don’t need to make the audience seasick; the music is enough to indicate how seriously dangerous everything is). After that, I don’t remember noticing it; maybe it stopped, maybe I tuned it out. Other than that, sit back and enjoy the ride.

Production is very good, acting is decent all around except for Julia Stiles. Luckily she mostly has to look beautiful while looking at Matt Damon, and she does that well. Plot is there to justify the action sequences, but I didn’t notice any major holes.

There’s a long chase scene where Bourne steals a police car in Manhattan to escape the bad guys, followed by much high-speed driving, cars hitting each other, driving backwards at high speed to ram someone, SUVs flipping over etc. Having just been driving in Manhattan, I can testify that the traffic is exactly like the movie.